In this article, we discuss the social demands on parents and children in a context of growing neoliberalisation and sociocultural change. Borrowing from the notion of intensive parenting, and extending it to children’s experience, we conceive of the parent–child link as a social relationship in which the participants relationally configure heterogeneous and dynamic subject positions. Based on the results of a discursive study conducted in Chile, we also describe some of the positions that parents and children adopt in the contemporary context. In this study, the almost claustrophobic and over-attentive tone through which parents and children describe their relationship is remarkable, as is the painful and emotionally taxing nature of the reciprocal care they have for one another, and the profoundly moral nature of the positions they adhere to.

In the context of the restructuring of production and the emergence of more flexible work patterns, this article contributes to our understanding of changing workplace subjectivities under neoliberalism in contemporary Chile. Using research carried out by the authors, it describes the break-up of traditional ‘occupational identities’ that historically played a key role in shaping labour subjectivities in three key sectors of the Chilean economy—mining, retail and public service. These occupational identities, which combine forms of know-how, moral values, and a sense of belonging, still have an important symbolic weight in work experiences although they are under severe pressure from flexible reorganisation processes. The emergence of new, more individualised workplace subjectivities based on generic skills and geared to strategic mobility, is also described. The coexistence of both workplace subject profiles accounts for the complexities and heterogeneity of the processes of cultural and subjective change in the current world of work.

The purpose of this article is to explore how artefacts, like an electronic gradebook and a student rulebook, are linked to the exercise of the global neoliberal rationality of government; drawing on the governmentality framework, those artefacts are analysed to describe how the present regime of global government influences the formation of certain types of subjectivities in the context of a Colombian private university. It is argued that the mediation done by these “simple” artefacts to produce an education of quality contributes not only to the local but to the global regulation of higher education around the world.

Immersed in the networks of artificial intelligences that are constantly learning from each other, the subject today is being configured by the automated architecture of a computational sovereignty (Bratton 2015). All levels of decision-making are harnessed in given sets of probabilities where the individuality of the subject is broken into endlessly divisable digits. These are specifically re-assembled at check points (Deleuze in Negotiations: 1972–1990, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995), in ever growing actions of predictive data (Cheney-Lippold in We are data and the making of our digital selves, NYU Press, New York, 2017), where consciousness is replaced by mindless computations (Daston in “The rule of rules”, lecture Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, November 21st, 2010). As a result of the automation of cognition, the subject has thus become ultimately deprived of the transcendental tool of reason. This article discusses the consequences of this crisis of conscious cognition by the hands of machines by asking whether the servo-mechanic model of technology can be overturned to expose the alien subject of artificial intelligence as a mode of thinking originating at, but also beyond, the transcendental schema of the self-determining subject. As much as the socio-affective qualities of the user have become the primary sources of capital abstraction, value, quantification and governmental control, so has technology, as the means of abstraction, itself changed nature. This article will suggest that the cybernetic network of communication has not only absorbed physical and cognitive labour into its circuits of reproduction, but is, more importantly, learning from human culture, through the data analysis of behaviours, the contextual use of content and the sourcing of knowledge. The theorisation of machine learning as involving a process of thinking will be taken here as a fundamental inspiration to argue that the expansion of an alien space of reasoning, envisioning the possibility of machine thinking against the servo-mechanic model of cybernetics.

In the wake of post-structuralism and posthumanism, contemporary theory has struggled to conceptualize the subject without reproducing the human/technology dichotomy. Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic ontology of desiring-production as synthesis, we develop the concept of synthetic subjectivation as an alternative. Synthetic subjectivation is a conjunctive event within a dynamic and recursive process that both results from and intervenes in a composition of material elements and embodied potentials, including organic, technical, and social elements. The subject is a subject of the composition, not of the organism or the technical machine. Deleuze and Guattari’s work serves as the basis of this approach, but, drawing on the media analysis of Friedrich Kittler, we rethink the syntheses as investments in a sociotechnical field. A case study of a university makerspace illustrates the concept. At stake in makerspaces, and in any context of subjectivation, is the autopoietic capacity of the composition to pilot desire and produce active, joyful subjects.

This article explores recent relationships between voice and subjectivity in the context of voice recognition technology. The voice is usually framed as a reflection of, if not estrangement from, subjectivity. The underlying assumption is that the voice proliferates in multiple directions and, as such, contributes towards the decentring of subjectivity. Such a perspective is popular amongst those who carry out a posthumanist methodology: namely, that attributes of subjectivity can be reframed so as to diminish human exceptionalism. However, the recent popularity of voice recognition technology poses a new challenge to the decentred subject. This article explores such a challenge by arguing that voice recognition technology resituates the subject with a primordial auto-affection, which is a term introduced by Jacques Derrida. The paper thus examines voice recognition technology as an instrumental case study, intending to explore theoretical positions on the phenomenological voice and its implications for understanding contemporary biometrics. By doing so, the article revisits the notion that the voice and subjectivity rest at the centre of recent experiences with voice recognition technology. While such an argument does not intend to displace the admirable approaches to voice mentioned, it does situate affect, voice, and technology historically as a coordinated effort for new affectively based modes of social control.

This article explores mundane political agency. We introduce the notion of the political ordinary as agency based on the capacity of human beings to carry out acts that are undetermined and unexpected, and thus capable of challenging, opposing, negotiating, maintaining, and readjusting prevailing conditions. We approach subjectivity from a pragmatist and phenomenological point of view and argue that it is the condition of possibility of political agency. The paper demonstrates how political subjectivity can be located in the ways in which people take up issues that stand out as important to them. To this end, we look into the everyday life experiences of an eleven-year-old girl whose struggles related to proposed subject positions provide examples of mundane political agency. We conclude by arguing that political agency is the subject’s action when in a state of becoming prompted by future-oriented demands and contingencies of social life.