The death of the centered subject frees feeling but makes it impersonal and free-floating.

Evidence

The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego — what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more — the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings — which it may be better and more accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard, to call “intensities” — are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria, a matter to which we will want to return later on. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 72

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of ‘waning of affect’ with the crucial Lyotard gloss: postmodern feeling is ‘intensity’ — free-floating, impersonal, euphoric, not the alienated anxiety of the monad.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from ‘no self present to do the feeling’ to euphoric intensity is a dense, almost paradoxical claim about a world of feeling without a feeler — sits with the reader well beyond one reading.
• QUESTION: Is ‘liberation from every other kind of feeling as well’ a genuine description of contemporary experience, or does it overstate? The reader may want to test this against actual modern cultural products.
• XREF: connects to: Without a center of reference, instrumental meanings collapse into the indifferent in-itself.