This essay reframes debates on posthumanism in relation to a longer history of revolt against possessive individualism. I introduce the term “technovitalism” to denote a type of self that first emerged in opposition to industrial labor at the turn of the twentieth century, and which fuses a Romantic commitment to creative self-expression with technological rationality. Technovitalism represents a posthuman form of subjectivity avant la lettre that celebrates interdependence and vitalist becoming as the ground of being. At the same time, it promotes post-disciplinary forms of labor aimed at optimizing the productive resources of subjects in pursuit of self-actualization. Tracing a genealogy of the technovitalist self through cultural and economic history, the essay uses technovitalism as a lens through which to map the relationship between changing labor practices and the rise of a new subject, which closely resembles neovitalist accounts of the posthuman today
