Steven Shaviro > Quotes

“[Walmart]s largest innovation consists in getting rid of the central Fordist principle of paying the workers enough so that they can afford to buy what they manufacture. Instead, WalMart has pioneered the inverse principle: paying the workers so little that they cannot afford to shop anywhere other than at WalMart. It might even be said, not too hyperbolically, that WalMart has singlehandedly preserved the American economy from total collapse, in that their lowered prices are the only thing that has allowed millions of the “working poor” to retain the status of consumers at all, rather than falling into the “black hole” of total immiseration. WalMart is part and parcel of how the “new economy” has largely been founded upon transferring wealth from the less wealthy to the already-extremely-rich. ”
― Steven Shaviro

“life’s intensity, like a sine wave, closes in on a limit without ever reaching it.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“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.”
― Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect

“Capitalism has to transform plenitude into scarcity, because it cannot endure its own abundance.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“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.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“no one has ever died from contradictions.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“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.”
― Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect

“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.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“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”
― Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect

“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.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“We should therefore reject the entire dichotomy between central planning, on the one hand, and market “rationality” on the other.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“Audre Lord famously argued that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“I am entirely serious, therefore, in suggesting that something like Wilde’s aestheticism is a relevant model for postcapitalism.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

“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 . . .”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism