Certain public spaces act like chromatography, the force field of social energy sorting the people into distinct layers according to categories that seemed immediately understood and accepted by all the participants but which would have been difficult to articulate fully. The distribution of real and imagined ironical awareness elicited by such situations being quite different from that of social power, although the two are not without some interaction, for which advertisements and other reflexive cultural products provide the nodal points. He found these situations almost unbearable, but also fascinatingly horrible. The social forces drive towards definition and utter specificity, the ironic dimension work just as hard at reaffirming the definitions in a backhanded way, by seeming to undo them. Obscure memories would recur, together with more recent illusions and rationalisations, their assumptions grotesquely exposed in the harsh light struck from this clash of forces.