Sublime

It also poses the question of whether current forms of electronic separation and perceptual management are part of conditions that would inhibit or deflect the processes Sartre details.

The forms of control accompanying the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s were more invasive in their subjective effects and in their devastation of shared and collectively supported relations.

Central to the Critique is its meditation on the systemic strategies of separation that prevent the objective reality of daily life from being perceived by the individuals who inhabit it—a problem no less acute today than when it was written, in the late 1950s.

For him, the 1990s opened onto a hyper-industrial era, not a post-industrial one, in which a logic of mass production was suddenly aligned with techniques that, in unprecedented ways, combine fabrication, distribution, and subjectivation on a planetary scale.

At the same time, whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability.

Spectacle, he writes, is the expropriation of that possibility; it is the production of a one-way communication that he characterizes as “a generalized autism.”

Contrary to many claims, there is an ongoing diminution of mental and perceptual capabilities rather than their expansion or modulation.

In its peremptory reductiveness, it celebrates a hallucination of presence, of an unalterable permanence composed of incessant, frictionless operations. It belongs to the aftermath of a common life made into the object of technics.

Modernization could not proceed in a world populated with large numbers of individuals who believed in the value or potency of their own internal visions or voices.