Discuss
But our selves are separated from each other. We’re encouraged not to have complex totalities, but instead to code switch between hundreds of simple consumer demographics. Even various flavors of Marxist and anarchist thought are recuperated this way. That feeling you get when two separate friend groups gathered for a party and you didn’t realize that you acted different around each of them? That feeling is now ubiquitous and used to manipulate us into consumption patterns
Yea Deleuze calls this identity fragmentation schizophrenia and argues that it’s the driving force behind post-modernism. The CEO of Buzzfeed actually famously wrote an academic article about this and then went on to weaponize it in the form of Buzzfeed’s “what my little pony horsie are you??” quizzes. Fisher, author of capitalist realism, argues that this is an ideological weapon of liberalism that locks you into supporting capitalism because the fracturing of the self fractures your ability to create biographical narratives and therefore destroys our ability to think historically and think outside of capitalism.
I really don’t think this tendency of capitalism is a constructive one. You can’t form a class consciousness if you don’t have a cohesive consciousness to begin with
I’ve been thinking about this. I haven’t thought it through but my intuition is that the mechanisms required to form a cohesive narrative without a cohesive self are inherently fascist. How would you accomplish this under capitalism without manufacturing an encompassing Other and leveraging it until one self dominates the others?
