Still, the neo-capitalism concept does touch on certain key features, to do with how subjectivity is machined rather than merely hailed into existence via language, as in Žižek. Lazzarato draws attention to the vacant language of org charts, graphs, budgets—one might add PowerPoints. Hierarchy is really organized more through the asignifying aspects of such procedures. Or take the call center, where the latest systems do not even require that the worker actually speak. She or he can just click on prerecorded phrases to step the caller through the sales routine.21 The software of course includes rating, ranking, classifying and timing functions.

In a useful insight, Lazzarato claims that what is managed now is not really labor so much as processes, of which labor is just a component. Management is not really about “human resources,” just resources for machinic enslavement, cordoned off in subroutines that are controlled and which have no reciprocal capacity to effect control. Lazzarato:

Sociology and industrial psychology seem to be incapable of grasping conceptually the qualitative leap that has occurred in the move from “work” to “process,” from subjection to enslavement. Those high on the hierarchy no longer deal with work but with “process” which integrates labor as “one” of its parts. (119)