Perhaps there is still a worldwide accepted metanarrative which tends to hide its condition as a metanarrative, disguising itself as a neutral characteristic of the general reality. This hidden metanarrative could be seen as capitalism with all of its attributes (entertainment, consumerism, technologies…). Capitalism would be a metanarrative that doesn’t give a rational explanation or take our human experiences into account. We would be able to detect this fact in two different points: 1.To maximize our personal benefit or our well-being doesn’t necessarily coincide with happiness in our experience. 2.To rely on the Adam Smith’s equation according which our private selfishness should be necessarily our best contribution to the common good.

1. Professor: Jorge Martínez Lucena

2. The post-modern condition (1979) by J. F. Lyotard
warned about the fall of the metanarratives in
Western Culture.
There are certain historical facts that promote our
skepticism of metanarratives:
- The Second World War (disasters and crimes
against humanity)
- May ‘68 (youth revolts against the bourgeois
life)
- The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (communism
shows how it is not viable at all and capitalism
seems to become the only valid alternative)
- 9/11 (the American dream is symbolically torn
apart)
The Fall of the Metanarratives

3. Metanarratives had two main functions traditionally:
1. Psychological:They let us make sense of our experiences, actions and life
in general.
2. Sociological:They provided us with social unity, because sharing the
criteria to judge life is a very strong agent of cohesion.The same ideal
lets us be together in the face of different situations.
Functions of Metanarratives

4. As soon as the metanarratives began to show their weaknesses, individuals
and societies within Western Culture felt their absence in form of anomie.
This anomie has two components:
• Psychological: Citizens don’t yet have a clear response to their need for
sense.
• Sociological: Our societies become more individualistic, narcissistic and
atomized.
Transformations withinWestern Culture

5. According to this explanation, after the fall of the metanarratives, our
societies should have become centers of violence with an absence of
governability, but they are not, generally speaking.
Question: How is psychological and sociological stability now constructed in
order to obtain social peace?
Governability inWestern Cultures

6. Perhaps there is still a worldwide accepted metanarrative which tends to
hide its condition as a metanarrative, disguising itself as a neutral
characteristic of the general reality.
This hidden metanarrative could be seen as capitalism with all of its
attributes (entertainment, consumerism, technologies…).
The Dumb Metanarrative

7. Capitalism would be a metanarrative that doesn’t give a rational explanation
or take our human experiences into account. We would be able to detect this
fact in two different points:
1.To maximize our personal benefit or our well-being doesn’t necessarily
coincide with happiness in our experience.
2.To rely on the Adam Smith’s equation according which our private
selfishness should be necessarily our best contribution to the common good.
The Dumb Metanarrative

8. Capitalism is a metanarrative that doesn’t appeal to our rational experience
in order to avoid contradictions. It aims instead to provide us with certain
emotions or emotional experiences which respond both to our psychological
need for sense and our sociological need for cohesion.
Capitalism and Emotions

9. • Our psychological need for sense is met in various ways, such as through
the intensity and authenticity of our fictional capitalist experiences as
consumers.
• Our sociological need to maintain social agreement on basic questions is
met by neo-tribal phenomena which provide us with a sense of belonging
and feelings of authenticity. What gives us unity as a society today is the
fact that our unconscious ideal is to be alternative, different and
authentic.
Capitalism and Emotions

10. The narratives selves of post-modern citizens are nowadays mainly
constructed through their consumerism of emotional and intense
experiences that allow them some sense of belonging to very liquid groups
(neo-tribal).
This neo-tribal belonging makes them feel different, special, and authentic,
while it is also the place to where all the differences are rerouted and
homologated through the post-modern market.
Self and Identity

11. Everyone is consuming difference, is feeling himself to be different while he
is really doing what everybody else does.
Everyone is saying, with his agency, something that he would not defend
rationally. We are saying that this emotional consumerism can make us
happy while, as we can see in our experience, the essence of consumerism
consist of never providing the consumer total satisfaction.
Self and Identity

12. Capitalism tries to assume the role of being the very
rationality of reality, instead of an economic ideology which
fundamentally fails to take into account several
(unmeasurable) factors of reality.
BUT
Capitalism, in its present-day formulation, is not capable of
providing us with this meaningfulness and satisfaction on a
rational level.
The Capitalist Paradox