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The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory "sequence" of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte, push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed into the capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, so that only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence - l’action directe - can awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

The problem with today’s superego injunction to enjoy is that, in contrast to previous modes of ideological interpellation, it opens up no "world" proper - it just refers to an obscure Unnameable. ..

Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the "danger" of capitalism: although it is global, encompassing the whole worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu "worldless" ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful "cognitive mapping." The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a "civilization," for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others, so that Europe's worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. 

---Zizek.

1970s. 

The sense of exhaustion, of no more new beginnings or 'experiments in living'. Been there, done that. Nature herself is depleted. Atrophy, winding down..Becket's Endgame, of course. 

The quest for the exotic is more than a century old! The shock of the new fails to shock. What next? After Auschwitz could anything more perverse and degenerate even be imagined? Is the only energy left the ability to move in a downward spiral?

By the 1950s people were already writing about this: the end of Tradition, transmission (Arendt); the 'worldlessness' of capitalism (Arendt again). The sense of an ending and therefore the need for conservation (of: words, seeds, heritage, human genetic material, historical buildings, wildlife, languages, species). The Royals would come in handy here; immigrants, too. The BBC and its shoring up of the ruins with fragments from the nostalgia industry.  

The push to more extreme forms of 'action' (de Sade); extreme sports, "kicks", "highs" in a jaded world. Freedom morphing into a kind of compulsive behaviour or nihilism (Eagleton: Holy Terror). "Have you ever considered any other kinds of freedom?", Brando would ask. Or: withdrawals, retreats, Buddhist mediation, Zen stillness (didn't Spengler say Buddhism would be a "late" religion?). Oceanic feelings, "release", just do it, go with the flow; football as a religion, rave parties: the need to disappear. In the 1970s there were the disappeared (Latin America). 

Abstract art: the disappearance of the human face. Hockney: we are witnesses to our absence. Technology and data flows. Human beings are just data points. Ambient music: everything is mere background now, as if we were living perpetually in an airport, with no departures and no arrivals, just the same old CNN re-runs. The abstract, neutral space that is no place, no place like home: airports, shopping malls, cinemas, and hotels that are all surface, depth less, shiny and eternal. Friction-less - travel light in the desert of the real, grasshopper, because all that matters in late capitalism is the space of flows, the networks.