Much of Baudrillard’s work was a commentary on this same effect: the way in which the abolition of the Symbolic led not to a direct encounter with the Real, but to a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real. For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls – both of which claimed to present reality in an

capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture.

This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, that ‘motley painting of everything that ever was’, whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal

What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new.

The effect of permanent structural instability, the ‘cancellation of the long term’, is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation. This is not a paradox.

The ‘rigidity’ of the Fordist production line gave way to a new ‘flexibility’, a word that will send chills of recognition down the spine of every worker today. This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and

In these conditions of ontological precarity, forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy.