ABSTRACT

Interpersonalism of the corporate form substitutes for simple social interaction and carries with it an entire culture and psychology of everyday life. The academic emphasis on postmodernism has drawn attention to the decadent, dissolute aspects of this culture, but not to its integrity, strength, and durability. Disorientation, decathexis, desensitization, and the accompanying demotivation, are aspects of both the emergence of a social structure of corporate informationalism and the failure of a postmodern culture to provide a culturally or individually integrative alternative. It is precisely and directly on the grounds and in the terms of this postmodern destruction that the creation of a new social being, a different organization and understanding of everyday life, occurs. Simultaneous with intensified alienation, the hyperabstraction of the prevailing society creates the relocation and refraining of the possibilities of an alternative social life into the language and thought of mysticism.