In this essay, artist and theorist Jet Le Parti renders a genealogy of the twenty-first-century condition as a forensic map: the twentieth century's refusals from the Beats to the hipster, globalization and the feed, sanitized club culture, parasocial intimacy and the platform gaze, the casino economy, and the chemistry of ketamine, research chemicals and benzodiazepines, through to the second death of God and the industry within. It reads this condition as the collective symptomatology of a social formation: the Dissociation Generation. It threads a lineage of thought from Nietzsche, Weber and Freud to Baudrillard, Haraway, Zuboff and Mark Fisher.
What he calls the Dissociation Generation is the population formed by life lived through the feed: war, work, sex, money and grief arriving on the same screen, at the same speed, all day. No one can feel all of it at full strength, so people learn to feel it from a distance. In his account, dissociation is not an individual disorder but a byproduct of the condition, made normal by the media, the market and the machine.
“A society of bubbles: hypermediated surfaces, inflated economies, a generation inheriting unforeseen debts but not a readable future. We find the condition of the time best captured in the airhead: chewing away at the night, anchored only by the body's need, while the mind floats elsewhere.
While the earth fissures, through climate, coercion, or collapse, to stay grounded is to lack perspective. Only from the high ground can you see another possible future.”
This essay considers the Dissociation Generation not as a bundle of symptoms but as a social formation shaped by the continuous, enveloping condition of twenty-first-century life. A generation here is defined less by birth years than by shared encounter with a destabilizing environment and a collective response to it. The essay traces how this formation fits within the lineage of twentieth-century cohorts, from the Lost Generation onward, noting how each answered crisis with its own posture and counter-space before being absorbed. What's distinctive now is a generation shaped by a medium rather than a singular event, and a refusal expressed not by exit but by a withdrawal enacted from within: participatory abstention, a gradual hollowing out of meaning, relation, and desire. The analysis follows this structure into social and political life, the interiorization of economic processes, and the changing demands placed on art. Throughout, dissociation is read as the lived seam between human and machine, not as pathology but as a condition of scale.
ABSTRACT
Section 10.1: The Industry Within
Behind the generational sequence runs a deeper history: the migration of industry from outside the body to inside it. The Dissociation Generation is the first formed at the end point of that migration.
The assembly line required more than new machines. It required a new type of human being, a psycho-physical adaptation of the worker to mechanized rhythm that reached as far as the regulation of drinking and sexuality (Gramsci 1929–35). Industry was already reaching past the factory gate into the habits of the body. But the factory remained a place, and the shift remained bounded.
The next stage spread the logic of production from the workplace to the whole of social life, the "social factory" (Tronti 1962), and moved production from the hand to the mind, the relationship and affect (Lazzarato 1996).
The present stage carries this to the interior. Data beyond what any service requires are extracted to predict and modify future action (Zuboff 2019), and capitalism has turned against sleep as the last unproductive interval (Crary 2013). Attention, mood, desire and impulse are now sites of extraction. Every pause on a video, every scroll, every bet and every rage-click is a unit of production for which the producer is not paid. The macro-industry of steel and coal has become a micro-industry of glances, heartbeats and reactions. Industry no longer surrounds the subject. It runs through it: an industry within.
This reframes the posthuman. The cyborg was once proposed as a figure of liberation, a hybrid that would dissolve the boundaries between human and machine on which domination depended (Haraway 1985). A less hopeful account traced how information came to be conceived as separable from its embodiment, the body treated as an accident (Hayles 1999). The Dissociation Generation lives the second account more than the first. It did not become posthuman through enhancement or upload but through integration, folded into machinic systems one habit and one default setting at a time.
The humanist subject, the self that thinks, chooses and means, was always a recent invention that might be erased "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (Foucault 1966). At the scale the generation now lives, that subject persists as an experience but no longer as the unit the system counts. The system counts reactions. It does not need the subject to mean anything, only to respond, and it gamifies the frame through streaks, odds, live counts, and autoplay so that response does not cease. Meanwhile the environment of response is thinning of humans: an expanding share of what circulates is generated, ranked and answered by automated systems, and the human is increasingly asked to prove its humanity to machines that speak more fluently than it does.
In this light, dissociation is not a malfunction of the human but the felt seam where the human is joined to the machine at planetary scale: the experience of being a person and a component at once. The Dissociation Generation is the first to feel that seam as the ordinary texture of life, and in that sense a prototype of whatever posthuman subject follows. Not the cyborg of the manifesto but the integrated node, adapting by going numb at the join.
EXCERPT / Written by Jet Le Parti
"By its very nature, dissociated affect is the generation's emotional register for this afterlife: performing the rituals of a world whose god has died twice."
Read the full text in our next print edition.
CLOSING
Introduction by: Claro Concetto
Written by: Jet Le Parti
Artwork by: Jet Le Parti
Photography by: Jet Le Parti
All images courtesy of Base 36.
CREDITS