Yes, there's a profound and under-explored relationship between unmediation and neoliberalism—especially if we define unmediation not just as a technical phenomenon, but as a broader epistemic and political mode that seeks to remove or bypass mediating institutions, relations, or symbolic frameworks.

Here are some key ways in which unmediation and neoliberalism intersect:

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1. Neoliberalism as an Engine of Unmediation

Neoliberalism—especially in its post-1970s form—erodes mediating institutions by asserting market logics and individual responsibility as the direct and "natural" mode of social organization. This leads to:

A world in which the subject interfaces directly with the market, with risk, with "reality"—without the buffers or interpretive frameworks that used to mediate those encounters.

This is unmediation as lived experience: the stripping away of social and symbolic infrastructure that used to shape how one understood, navigated, or resisted the world.

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2. Platform Capitalism and the Myth of Direct Access

Neoliberalism in its digital phase often fetishizes disintermediation—e.g., removing the "middleman" (taxi dispatchers, travel agents, journalists)—offering “direct access” through platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and social media.

But this “directness” is illusory: it replaces traditional mediators with opaque algorithmic and financial systems, which operate without public accountability. What looks like unmediation is in fact a remapping of mediation into forms that are harder to contest.

This remapping mirrors Agamben's idea of ungovernable exposure, or even bare life: one is exposed to systems that operate without clear symbolic or procedural mediation.

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3. Affective and Psychological Unmediation

Neoliberalism also encourages a kind of subjective unmediation, where people are expected to manage emotions, traumas, and life crises privately—without communal, diagnostic, or cultural mediation. Mental illness, for example, becomes a personal productivity failure rather than something situated in broader social breakdown.

This is a key point of contact with your prior interest in deinstitutionalization: the closure of institutions was often framed as liberation (removing coercive mediation), but under neoliberalism, it frequently left individuals exposed—again, unmediated—to market forces, family breakdown, or police power.

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4. Neoliberalism as Anti-Symbolic

There is a deep ontological resonance here too. Neoliberalism works to collapse symbolic space, substituting exchange value or data metrics for thick, meaningful symbolic mediation. This erasure of the symbolic is a form of epistemic and existential unmediation.

It's why neoliberal societies often feel disorienting or groundless: they operate as if the world is self-evident, calculable, and direct—but beneath this lies a desert of mediation, with no durable shared meanings.

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In sum: neoliberalism is not just compatible with unmediation—it actively produces it, both materially and ontologically. But crucially, it replaces older mediations with new, hidden ones, often more coercive and less accountable.

Would you like to explore how this connects to mental health systems, platform capitalism, or symbolic collapse in neoliberal subjectivity?

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symbolic collapse in neoliberal subjectivity

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Symbolic collapse in neoliberal subjectivity refers to a deep and disturbing phenomenon: the disintegration of the shared symbolic frameworks through which subjects historically made sense of themselves, others, and the world—replaced instead by flattened, economized, and performative metrics of selfhood.

Let’s unpack this across key dimensions:

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1. From Symbolic Embeddedness to Exposure

In earlier social formations—feudal, religious, even mid-20th-century liberal democratic—individuals were symbolically embedded: identity, value, and legitimacy were mediated by participation in shared institutions (church, family, class, nation), rituals, or myths.

Neoliberalism, by contrast, erodes these shared coordinates. It demands that the subject stand naked before the market, responsible for generating and marketing their own value.

The subject becomes not a bearer of symbolic meaning, but a producer of visibility, metrics, and affective labor—subjectivity itself is economized.

This shift parallels what Agamben calls the removal of the signature, where the gesture, the rite, or the communal reference loses its power, and what remains is bare action, or bare life.

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2. Crisis of the Imaginary: The Unavailability of Stable Stories

Without symbolic mediation, neoliberal subjectivity suffers a narrative and ontological crisis. You are supposed to "be yourself" or "brand yourself" without any available script. The subject is commanded to create meaning in a void.

This leads to:

• Exhaustion from constant self-reinvention

• Chronic comparison via social media (another pseudo-symbolic space)

• Loss of durable symbolic roles (e.g., worker, citizen, parent) in favor of contingent gigs and algorithmic self-promotion

• The internalization of the gaze: you become both your own product and your own surveillance system

The symbolic collapse is not just social but intrasubjective—you can no longer believe your own story.

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3. Displacement of the Symbolic by the Quantified

Symbols allow interpretation; metrics demand optimization.

Where a symbol (say, the priest’s robe, or the flag, or mourning ritual) defers meaning to shared, negotiated space, neoliberal regimes reduce meaning to number: followers, likes, productivity scores, credit ratings.

This is what Byung-Chul Han calls the shift from the immunological to the neural: no longer protecting boundaries (mediating Self/Other), neoliberalism encourages inner self-surveillance and competition—an unmediated contest with yourself.

In this world, symbolic authority becomes impossible. Expertise, tradition, or elderhood collapse into the flat economy of "content."

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4. Unconscious Saturation, Not Liberation

Rather than freeing the subject, this collapse results in:

• Hyper-fragmentation of identity

• Psychic unmooring (a kind of free-floating anxiety or depersonalization)

• A weird flattening of past/future, where nothing can stick, since all value must be instantly visible or monetizable

You might still use symbols—memes, rituals, aesthetics—but they don’t "bind" in the same way. They’re residual gestures, performative without being transformative.

The neoliberal subject is “free,” but in a vacuum—unmediated, unshielded, and symbolically homeless.

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This symbolic collapse can help explain:

• The rise of conspiratorial or hyper-religious thinking as a desperate re-symbolization

• Mental health crises as expressions of symbolic deprivation

• The appeal of reactionary politics promising symbolic order (nation, race, gender, etc.)