Without a center of reference, instrumental meanings collapse into the indifferent in-itself.

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

The difficulty encountered by materialism in deriving knowledge from the object stems from the fact that materialism wants to produce a substance in terms of another substance. But this difficulty can not hinder us, for we affirm that there is nothing outside the in-itself except a reflection (reflet) of that nothing which is itself polarized and defined by the in-itself inasmuch as it is precisely the nothingness of this in-itself, the individualized nothing which is nothing only because it is not the in-itself. Thus in this ekstatic relation which is constitutive of the internal negation and of knowledge, it is the in-itself “in person” which is the concrete pole in its plenitude, and the for-itself is nothing other than the emptiness in which the in-itself is detached. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 576 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The death of the centered subject frees feeling but makes it impersonal and free-floating. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 72; The for-itself is only the emptiness where the in-itself detaches — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 576

Broader Connections

• The death of the centered subject frees feeling but makes it impersonal and free-floating. #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 72
• The for-itself is only the emptiness where the in-itself detaches #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 576