As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary 

society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not 

merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind 

of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. 

This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are 

utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings -- which it may be 

better and more accurate, to call "intensities" -- are now free-floating and 

impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria. 

 -- Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic  

of Late Capitalism" 

In his 1984 article "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson famously declared postmodern culture to be proliferating a "waning of affect" characterized by "a new kind of flatness or depthlessness." The integrity of the unitary modern subject was now dissolving into schizophrenic fragmentation, its depth displaced by multiple forms of discombobulating surface articulations. This waning of affect, laments Jameson, does not deflate or eradicate expressive forms, but rather shifts their register from the realm of substantive feelings to fleeting "intensities." Jameson's concerns represent the culmination of an argument he began outlining in the pages of Social Text. If, in the inaugural issue of Social Text -- in an essay titled "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" (ST 1, 1979) -- Jameson can yet hold out for cultural forms whose manipulation and containment of conflicting social anxieties do not close down "their Utopian and transcendent potential," by the 

time he alights on "On Diva" (ST 6, 1982), he is ready to diagnose "the disappearance of 'affect' in the older sense, the sudden and unexpected absence of 'anxiety.' " Bye-bye chatty unconscious with all its anxious outpourings of repressed desires. Behold "the silence of affect" and a "new gratification in surfaces."