The previous examples clearly show the biopolitical accent of contemporary fashion as well as the process of secularization that I have been elaborating in this study. Fashion has become another weapon in the struggle for sovereignty. As we saw in the second chapter (2.12) secularization, in addition to a dissociation of spiritual or religious interests, implies an enclosure of the subject and his natural capacities in the realm of the commodity. In its most recent phase, this process takes on a new form: the co-optation, emptying and commodification of aesthetics and countercultural symbols by the establishment as a strategy to extend the scope of its operations. This is how aesthetic components of subcultures such as punk have passed to the mainstream. Leather, studs, skulls and torn stockings, lost their original meanings and were assimilated, digested and repackaged as acceptable forms of subversion. This is how “soft totalitarianism” effectively absorbs any attempt at opposition (5.4), its favorite mechanism is banalization.

Now, the fact that symbols that used to stand for rebellion and discontent now stand for subjection and conformity points to a generalized loss of interiority and the concomitant loss of freedom. For freedom, in the words of Marcuse,

implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.” 

Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual…¹

Society enters a Ballardian phase, says Pablo Capanna, when technology, having changed the landscape, starts invading our minds.² The outside supplants the inside and vice versa. That our inner self—our psyche, or intra-corporeality if you will (4.3, 4.10)—has already been invaded by technology and the media as if it were yet another extension of the territories occupied by traditional colonialism, can only point to its eventual disappearance. This is the end phase of secularization: a world populated by persons (masks) homogenized and completely lacking in interiority, the world-shopping mall described by Marilyn Mason (3.3.3). According to Robert Redeker, these humans, manufactured daily by the entertainment industry, embody a paradoxical historical inversion:

the old Christian dream of a profound identity between men that lies below the differences in appearance became, by losing its religious content, an identity of interiorities, which do not turn towards salvation but simply fill with the unconscious glitter of industrial entertainment. The actuality of conformism is summarized in the end of the difference of interiorities.³

Michael A. Weinstein’s comment according to which “the mind is on its way to being exteriorized again” (5.2), is connected to the hypersecularization elaborated by Redeker (5.3). The mind externalized in the media (which is being simultaneously “interiorized” in whatever remains of the “self”) and the body understood as a surface, are modern variations of the collective mind of the mystery religions and the early Christian communities. The inner and outer homogenization implicit in consumerism is yet another version of the hive-minds of primitive religions. A regression to a previous form of consciousness.

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1. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 12. ↩︎
2. J.G. Ballard, Para una autopsia de la vida cotidiana: conversaciones, 9. Writer's translation. ↩︎
3. Redeker, Egobody, 43. ↩︎