No person today could possibly feel deeply, profoundly, or authentically each time we are cued to do so in the cultural environment of late consumer societies. In these environments, the average person comes into contact with more than two thousand promotional messages a day alone–messages that rationalize fear, anxiety, peace, well-being, contentment, ecstasy, or joy as appropriate responses to the consumption of commodities as banal as batteries and shampoo. In one notorious television commercial in the early 2000s, a woman simulates an orgasm as she washes her hair with a new brand of shampoo. A commercial for a frozen dinner depicts the acceptance, love, and unity of a family drawn together around the dinner table. A deodorant commercial depicts the stigma of social unacceptability and ostracism. McDonalds offers a profound bonding between father and son for the price of a happy meal. If affect can be engaged virtually everywhere, it is because it has been hollowed out–a surface version of a former, more rare event. The surfeit of affect is the waning of affect. Affect is everywhere exploded and repressed at the same time. - Beverley Best, Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding: The Dialectic of Affect

It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of our hockey team winning a match. The same degree of impression! We fail to notice the monstrous discrepancy between these two events. The channels of our perception have been smothered out to the point where we are no longer aware. - Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time