Monopoly capitalism splits lived experience from the structures governing it

Evidence

The problems of figuration that concern us will only become visible in the next stage, the passage from market to monopoly capital, or what Lenin called the “stage of imperialism”; and they may be conveyed by way of a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience. Too rapidly we can say that, while in older societies and perhaps even in the early stages of market capital, the immediate and limited experience of individuals is still able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs that experience, in the next moment these two levels drift ever further apart and really begin to constitute themselves into that opposition the classical dialectic describes as Wesen and Erscheinung, essence and appearance, structure and lived experience. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 877

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the essence/appearance gap underlying the waning of affect and cognitive mapping — core to the reader’s purpose.
• QUESTION: The claim that early market capital lets individual experience coincide with economic form is worth interrogating — is Don Quixote’s standardization real coincidence?
• XREF: connects to: Monopoly capitalism destroys the very notion of property while retaining its form; Monopoly pricing and planning emerged from US capital centralization since 1900 — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 803; Under monopoly capitalism classes persist objectively while becoming socially invisible. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 680 (+2 more)