The present is saturated by the ghost of lost futures—of possibilities foreclosed not by natural entropy but by ideological capture. What we are left with is a form of suffering suspended in time, a permanent crisis with no nameable origin and no conceivable resolution. Just as the Gesamtkunstwerk stages the self as sovereign while erasing the stage itself, so too does late capitalist culture replay its own imagery in loop, unable to produce the new, only the recursive.

Together, these frameworks reveal that pathology is not only political—it is semiotic, affective, and temporal. The individual is not only cut off from structural meaning but made to perform autonomy, to inhabit failure as personal fate rather than systemic effect. What appears as internal crisis is, in fact, the residue of a collective disintegration. Fisher saw the contemporary cultural moment as haunted by futures that were once imaginable but are now foreclosed. Neoliberal realism stages the individual as free and self-creating, but only within a loop of preapproved aesthetic and existential forms. The self becomes a melancholic echo chamber.

The human nervous system becomes the primary terrain of struggle, leading to cognitive and affective pathologies: anxiety, depression, panic, fatigue. Power becomes pathology via a symbolic and neurological overload that mimics freedom while enforcing submission.

This Gesamtkunstwerk of neoliberal subjectification is not only symbolic or aesthetic—it is instantiated in material structures, institutional protocols, and everyday practices. The clinic, the school, the benefits office, the prison, the border, the app interface, the algorithm: each one encodes and enacts moral economies of worthiness, productivity, and legibility. These sites are not neutral; they are arenas of ontological triage, where the capacity to be recognized as a viable subject is sorted, managed, or foreclosed.

As David Smail observed, the “causes” of psychological distress often lie outside the skin, in socio-economic arrangements and administrative routines that render people helpless while holding them personally accountable. China Mills and others have shown how mental health systems themselves reproduce violence, often under the guise of care—extracting data while leaving untouched the structural determinants of suffering.

Protocols—forms, assessments, thresholds, conditionalities—do not merely warehouse distress; they produce it. They fragment the person into case numbers and risk profiles. This is how ontological insecurity is not just felt but administered: through welfare systems that humiliate, housing policies that displace, border regimes that criminalize presence, and digital infrastructures that demand constant self-performance. The body becomes the last site of resistance and inscription, bearing the weight of systemic disavowal.

So while the biopolitical Gesamtkunstwerk may stage the individual as self-sufficient, its choreography is enabled by logistical and procedural violence. The tragedy it presents is not that the subject fails to live up to their freedom—but that this “freedom” was always a managed illusion, enforced by systems that materialize abandonment in the name of autonomy.

The result is not merely alienation. It is a ritualized disintegration, a state in which suffering is simultaneously produced, measured, disbelieved, and privatized. The Gesamtkunstwerk stages freedom, choice, and personal responsibility—but only by scripting collapse as an internal drama, disconnected from its systemic authors.

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References:

• The United Nations Rapporteur on poverty has condemned the UK’s welfare system as "punitive, callous, and often cruel."

• Mark Fisher’s concept of bureaucratic sadism (from Capitalist Realism) fits here: institutions that seem designed to fail people in order to produce docility or disappearance.

• Public health scholarship has increasingly documented how austerity is correlated with rising mental illness and suicide, yet these are rarely treated as structural effects.

LLM