Zukerfeld 2017 - Premio ESOCITE 2018

"Now, at first glance it could seem strange that we consider individual or collective subjects (although actually it is the knowledge that they carry) as an output of some productive processes. Resistance to this idea could have at least two root causes: on the one hand, humanist ontological inertia. On the other hand, a vague idea that productive processes result in ‘goods and services’ and not subjects. In terms of the first, in effect the dominant ontology, especially since industrial capitalism, accustoms us to making a rigid division between objects and subjects: it is a tacit but firmly held belief that objects are produced, but subjects are not. Of course, denaturalising and rejecting this perspective is not at all novel. There are recent and fashionable antecedents in Foucault ([1966] 2002), but above all in Haraway (1991, 1992), Fuller (2009), Sloterdijk (2016) and many more. Unfortunately, these authors do not usually recognise that it is Hegel who, in Phenomenology of Spirit, shows with clarity that subjects produce themselves at the same time as they produce the world. Our concept of productive processes aims to take this Hegelian element and combine it with more contemporary ideas and, above all, to bring it to bear on the historical, empirical, and even economic terrain (although in a different sense to Marx)."

"On the other hand, we are accustomed to associating the result of productive processes with goods and/or certain services. Let us explore this a little. Goods, that is, entities that survive the moment of their production and over which property rights can be exercised, are varied. For example, tables, paper airplanes, software, or texts. Even though the last two are of a particular type (informational goods), it is not difficult to understand that all these examples emerge from something that it is appropriate to call productive processes, which are not necessarily commodity production processes but could be the fruits of leisure time or production for personal consumption."

Zukerfeld 2017 - PP 106 -  "Knowledge Flows: From Translation to Capitalism"