Die Erzeugung kapitalistischer Realitätsprobleme: Wachstumsregimes und ihre subjektiven Grenzen

Incomplementary to the broad debates around “ecological limits to growth”, this article examines the limits that capitalist expansionary dynamics may run up against with respect to its ability to exploit the resource of human labour. It focuses on the historical junctures at which the subjective dispositions of the people produced by a growth society can be seen to enter into a conflict with the permanently rising demands that very same society confronts them with, a conflict that can only be resolved through far-reaching change in societal structures. The first part draws on regulation theory's notion of “growth regime” and Foucault's concept of “dispositive” to suggest an analytics of different capitalist growth regimes as specific modes of production of human subjectivity. The second part demonstrates how this theoretical framework can enlighten the (relative and formation-specific) limits to the capitalist valorisation of human subjectivity, by giving a brief and highly stylized account of the history of capitalist subjectification in (West) Germany, interpreted as a sequence of three such regimes.