Instead of culminating in hoped-for emancipation, the advances of technology and "Reason" made it that much easier to exploit the South of planet earth, blindly replace human labour by machines, and set up more and more sophisticated subjugation techniques, all through a general rationalisation of the production process. So the modern emancipation plan has been substituted by countless forms of melancholy.

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Les presses du réel: 2002) p. 12