An often cited example of the limitations of perception goes like this: if we all wake up tomorrow and everything is ten times bigger than it was, we would not know it. The key word here is obviously “everything”—that is, including ourselves together with our perception apparatus. This simple example speaks to the impossibility of detecting change if everything is changed. In other words, the change concerns only the absolute parameters but preserves intact the initial relationships between things, the proportions, the relative values, structure as a whole. If we take this as the worst possible ideological manipulation model, in which, theoretically, the sensibilities and perceptions of the manipulated subject are altered together with the worsening conditions of reality (a reality from which he is not supposed to differentiate himself), we end up with absolute manipulation. What would make such manipulation absolute, if it were possible, is the fact that the interference of the system into the mind of the individual would be undetectable and thus bearable; in fact, not only bearable, but possibly satisfying from the point of view of the subject, who would have developed a subliminal need for the system, as may be the case with the contemporary Western living style of insidious hyper-consumption.
And yet, how can we distinguish between a subject’s conditioned need for the system (expressed through multiple needs for what the system produces) from what the subject “really” needs? Marcuse, for example, defines true and false needs as objective categories,1 based on the universal value of human freedom and the universal immorality of exploitation. But this formulation cannot solve the question of the ease and apparent freedom with which the consumer can and does adapt to the wealth of so-called “late capitalism.” It is no longer a question of the physical demands of capital on the worker’s body.