Postmodern pathology displaces anxiety and alienation with the subject’s fragmentation

Evidence

All of which suggests some more general historical hypothesis: namely, that concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences to which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern. The great Warhol figures — Marilyn herself or Edie Sedgewick — the notorious cases of burnout and selfdestruction of the ending 1960s, and the great dominant experiences of drugs and schizophrenia, would seem to have little enough in common any more either with the hysterics and neurotics of Freud’s own day or with those canonical experiences of radical isolation and solitude, anomie, private revolt, Van Gogh-type madness, which dominated the period of high modernism. This shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 68

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core definition of the ‘waning of affect’/‘fragmentation of the subject’ thesis the reader needs to explain.
• XREF: Connects to paranoia/schizophrenia discussions in Deleuze and Guattari and to the reader’s goal of distinguishing modern vs postmodern affect. — connects to: Positing oneself as object before an absolute non-objective subject produces fear and alienation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 786; Postmodern ‘waning of affect’ fragments the subject into depthless, spasmodic flux. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 154; The demand for concreteness in philosophy stems from primordial anxiety — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 744 (+1 more)