Quotes from Steven Shaviro

Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation, and distribution. They generate subjectivity, and they play a crucial role in the valorization of capital.

Capitalism has to transform plenitude into scarcity, because it cannot endure its own abundance.

life's intensity, like a sine wave, closes in on a limit without ever reaching it.

For Massumi, affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified, and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified, and meaningful, a "content" that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions.

A map does not just replicate the shape of a territory; rather, it actively inflects and works over that territory.7 Films and music videos, like the ones I discuss here, are best regarded as affective maps, which do not just passively trace or represent, but actively construct and perform, the social relations, flows, and feelings that they are ostensibly "about." In

What is the appeal of accelerationism today? It can be understood as a response to the particular social and political situation in which we currently seem to be trapped: that of a long-term, slow-motion catastrophe.

no one has ever died from contradictions.

If posthuman self-alteration is not folded into an aesthetic of self-cultivation, then it will only be answerable to the programs of large corporations.

We should therefore reject the entire dichotomy between central planning, on the one hand, and market "rationality" on the other.

This leads to a veritable Kantian Antinomy of the aesthetic under late capitalism. Aesthetics must be simultaneously promoted beyond all measure, and yet reduced to nothing.

Wilde thus had a wonderful political rationalization for his extravagantly privileged existence: just lie around all day in loose crimson garments reading Plato and sipping brandy and be your own communist society . . .

Audre Lord famously argued that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.