The Saturated State - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Saturated State: Mood, Consent, and the Performance of Power

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

We are governed not by force alone, but by saturation—of noise, of image, of pace. This episode explores how distraction, emotional overload, and political fatigue are not accidents of the moment but tools of governance. It asks what happens when democracy becomes aesthetic, memory becomes unstable, and speech becomes calibration rather than expression.

Power today no longer declares. It performs. Drawing on the work of Byung-Chul Han, who examines the psychic toll of hyper-visibility, and Lauren Berlant, who identifies the slow erosion of public optimism, this episode explores how governance now operates atmospherically—through mood, through rhythm, and through exhaustion.

With Mark Fisher’s critique of capitalist realism and Simone Weil’s notion of attention as moral discipline, we ask what it means to hold shape when institutions collapse inward. What forms of refusal remain in a world saturated not by fear, but by feeling?

Why Listen?

• Understand how emotion, repetition, and pace are used as instruments of governance
• Engage with the concept of saturation as political atmosphere, not just media effect
• Examine how aesthetic forms can erode civic agency and public optimism
• Learn how thinkers like Han, Berlant, Fisher, and Weil reframe attention as resistance

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
• Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
• Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002.

Bibliography Relevance

• Lauren Berlant: Grounds the concept of “cruel optimism” as a lens for understanding emotional governance
• Byung-Chul Han: Frames transparency and hyper-communication as coercive norms of contemporary life
• Mark Fisher: Diagnoses the psychic effects of neoliberal realism as cultural saturation and inertia
• Simone Weil: Offers attention as an ethical stance, enabling resistance through care and perception

To endure saturation is not to escape it, but to find new rhythms beneath it. Resistance, here, is a way of listening.

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