Lazzarato mentions all too briefly the role that property rights plays in tying the desubjectivized world of machines to the subject-producing world of discourse. “By ensuring that creation and production are uniquely the feats of ‘man,’ it uses the ‘world,’ emptied of all ‘soul,’ as its own ‘object,’ as the instrument of its activities, as the means to its ends” (35). The property form makes the individualized subject the author and hence owner of something that is really much more likely the product of a machinic assemblage of different bits of various people’s subjectivity, various machines, assorted technical resources. Hence we end up with the myth that Steve Jobs created the iPhone—and reaped most of the rewards from it.

Lazzarato: “it is never an individual who thinks” (44). And it is never a corporation that produces. The corporation appropriates the unassigned values of a machinic “commons,” as it were, “free of charge,” and captures it in the form of profit or rent. Just as capital appropriates the natural commons, here it appropriates the social commons, or rather a social-machinic one.6 Meanwhile, the dividual agents have to be patched back together as more-or-less whole subjects meant to think of themselves existentially as free agents who are both investors and debtors, trading in the self as currency in a market for souls.

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)