Our societies’ opacity makes social critique sound psychological or anthropological.

Evidence

I want to add that the way in which (objectively, if you like) this analysis takes on the appearance of anthropology or social psychology either is itself to be reckoned back into the phenomenon we are describing: not merely is this anthropological or psychological appearance a function of a basic representational dilemma about late capitalism (which we will touch on below); it is also the result of the failure of our societies to achieve any kind of transparency; indeed it is virtually the same as that failure. In a transparent society in which our various positions in social production were clear to us and to everybody else — so that, like Malinowski’s savages, we could take a stick and draw a diagram of the socioeconomic cosmology on the sand of the beach — it would not sound either psychological or anthropological to refer to what happens to people who have no say in their work: no Utopian or Nowhereon would think you were mobilizing hypotheses about the Unconscious or the libido, or foundationally presupposing a human essence or a human nature; perhaps it would sound more medical, as though you were talking about a broken leg or paralysis of the whole right side. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 689

Categorization

• XREF: The transparency/opacity axis connects to the later argument about cognitive mapping the reader wants to attempt for their own position.
• QUESTION: A testable angle: does post-2008 discourse about alienation actually become MORE psychological (therapy-speak) precisely as capitalism’s opacity deepens?