The Interface Subject: Foucault, Benjamin, and the Hybrid Logics of Digital Capitalism

This article revisits the formation of capitalist subjectivity through a dialogue between Foucault’s genealogy of discipline and Benjamin’s critique of commodity fetishism, arguing that contemporary platform capitalism synthesizes these logics to produce a new subject: the interface subject. Where Foucault illuminates how institutions fabricate docile, productive bodies, Benjamin reveals how commodities enchant the collective imagination through aesthetic and libidinal appeal. Under digital capitalism, these mechanisms converge in algorithmic architectures that govern through both behavioral optimization and curated desire. Platforms like Uber or TikTok exemplify this hybrid regime, where gamified labor and algorithmic phantasmagoria collapse the factory and the arcade into a single dispositif. Against accounts that frame digital subjectivity as either entrepreneurial or exhausted, this paper theorizes the interface subject as suspended between coercion and euphoria—a figure shaped by the twin imperatives of metricized performance and affective investment.