Aestheticizing Suffering

"Could it be that what were in the past necessary and substantive critiques of representation have become, in practical terms, hindrances to actually looking at images? And that this has contributed to an effective political passivity in the face of a rapidly changing communications environment? Hariman and Lucaites rightly point to “the larger problem identified by Peter Sloterdijk that modernity has entered into a terminal phase of ‘enlightened selfconsciousness’ whereby all forms of power have been unmasked with no change in behavior [my emphasis]. Irony is too widely dispersed throughout modern consciousness, subjectivity too fragmented, the administration of power too cynical, and critique too disposed to reification for unmasking to be other than a reproduction of the world it would change.”"