The administered subject cannot distinguish external suggestion from internal desire
Evidence
Meanwhile, what remains of the subjective, with its illusions of autonomy and its impoverished satisfactions, its ever diminishing images of happiness, is no longer able to distinguish between external suggestion and internal desire, is incapable of drawing a line between the private and the institutionalized, and finds itself therefore wholly delivered over to objective manipulation. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 87
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: This is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation of the collapse between private and institutionalized desire under late capitalism — the very ground of false consciousness that Jameson returns to across the book.
- XREF: Directly prefigures Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ and connects to Adorno’s concept of the administered society. — connects to: Desire is consciousness troubled by its own inapprehensible facticity