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Chapter
Afterthought
DOI link for Afterthought
Afterthought book
Afterthought
DOI link for Afterthought
Afterthought book
ABSTRACT
Neoliberal capitalism rises with what German sociologist Gerhard Schulze has called "the experience society". As early as 1972, futurologist Alvin Toffler was already proposing what a decade later economists Morris Holbrook and Elizabeth Hirschman would explicitly advocate: that capitalism must explore "the experiential aspects of consumption". Benjamin saw that capitalism would reproduce itself by affirming its grip on subjectivity through the implementation of a totalizing "society of information", where information displaces both "intelligence that comes from afar" and "experience" The monitoring and monetizing of the ways participants-consumers feel, narrate and disseminate their experiences is what constitutes neoliberal dis-experience. Symptomatically, its rise coincides with the demise of the figure of the witness that characterizes what Eyal Weizman has recently called "forensic aesthetics".