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".
