Technology is a figure for dead labor’s alienated counterfinality

Evidence

I am anxious that this other thing not overhastily be grasped as technology per se, since I will want to show that technology is here itself a figure for something else. Yet technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery — an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the practico-inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well as our individual praxis. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 125

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Sartre’s ‘counterfinality of the practico-inert’ as the real referent beneath technological imagery — core to reading postmodern style as economy’s appearance.
• XREF: connects to: Workers are paid to build the technology that renders them redundant — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 246; Technofeudalism extends alienation from labor’s products to ownership of minds — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 774; Automation qualitatively alters dead versus living labor and surplus value — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 179