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?

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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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