Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Capitalism is a set of rituals.
Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism.
Just because something is current doesn't mean it is new.
There is no right to not be offended, nor should there be.
De Palma's great theme, obsessively reiterated, is betrayal.
Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.
In a world of niches, we are enchained by our own consumer preferences.
The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.
In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.
Although it was published in 1977, "A Scanner Darkly's" mood is already postpunk.
A Scanner Darkly' is one of Dick's bleakest novels, and almost certainly his saddest.
Like all of Moore's work, 'V for Vendetta' is considerably less than the sum of its parts.
The ruling ideology prefers to talk about individual ethics rather than the capitalist system.
What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?
The arrival of 'Star Wars' signalled the full absorption of the former counterculture into a new mainstream.
What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a rejection of the idea of music as entertainment.
I'm the world's greatest apologist for Brian De Palma but his version of Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia' is a disaster.
Some IMDB viewers complain that 'Beloved' should have been reclassifed as Horror... well, so should American history.
You can be debased without relinquishing your identity, just as you can relinquish your identity without being debased.
It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated. But this says nothing about their causation.
To be able to function in late capitalism without being a psychological wreck, it is necessary to accept the insane as standard.
Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.
I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.
The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say 'You might not like it, but it works.' But Britain is not efficient.
Star Wars' was a sell-out from the start, and that is just about the only remarkable thing about this depressingly mediocre franchise.
The World Cup is like the Overlook Hotel: the identities of individual meat puppets might change, but the structure continues endlessly.
Under neoliberal governance, workers have seen their wages stagnate and their working conditions and job security become more precarious.
We once turned to popular culture because it produced fantasy objects; now, we are asked to 'identify with' the fantasising subject itself.
In 'A Scanner Darkly,' as in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' all intersubjective relations devolve into webs of suspicion and betrayal.
What better example than the World Cup is there of the fact that individual people are irrelevant while impersonal structures are invariant?
What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing and supplication.
When pop can no longer muster a nihilation of the World, a nihilation of the Possible, then it will only be the ghosts that are worthy of our time.
What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.
Picnic at Hanging Rock' is the exemplary study of disapparition in cinema - I know of no other major film which deals with unexplained disappearance.
If people dying as a consequence of the implementation of measures cannot count as evidence that the legislation has detrimental effects, what would?
The moment that most fascinated me in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' was its descriptions of times of transition from one reality to another.
Columbo's deliberately irritating questioning technique - 'just one more thing' - is designed to produce discomfort rather than to elicit information.
Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.
I make no special effort to conceal my surname online; the reason I do not use it is more because I dislike, even loathe it, than because I want to keep it a secret.
Children of Men' reinforces what few would doubt, but which British cinema would seldom lead you to suspect: the British landscape bristles with cinematic potential.
Noir' has been talked about a great deal in the discussion of 'The Black Dahlia,' but De Palma's palllete couldn't be less monochrome; it's the very definition of garish.
Much of reality TV has been like the worst nightmares of Theodor Adorno and Jean Baudrillard come true, its seductive allure turning us into gossips in the global village.
Play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
Basic Instinct 2' is camp, not because it takes itself too seriously, nor because it sends itself up, but because we are not sure quite how seriously it wants us to take it.
Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'
The neoliberal policies implemented first by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s and continued by New Labour and the current coalition have resulted in a privatisation of stress.
While football embarrassingly exposes the excesses of capitalism, the Olympic sports have been used to propagate the neoliberal mantra that success is simply a matter of hard work.
There is no need to subject people in capitalism to additional suffering; the point is to get them to recognize that the suffering they are already undergoing is caused by capitalism.
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.
On the Junior Boys' 'When No-one Cares' beats are abandoned altogether, the track's 'endless night' lit only by the dying-star flares and stalactite-by-flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics.