Information Uprising Quotes

“The most direct critique [in the TV series The Prisoner] of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly [the episode] “Free for All”, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left. In many ways, “Free for All” is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of “A., B. & C.”; whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such—or what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“Repression in late capitalism does not typically involve the absolute expropriation of the subject typical of liberal or monopoly capitalism (the nationalism which violently excludes other nationalities, the sexism which expropriates women’s household labor on behalf of masculinized national corporations and power-bureaucracies, the racism by which the colonies and colonized are held in subjection to the colonists, and so forth) but what might be termed its relative immiseration on the multinational marketplace of identity: thus the celebrated media superstar whose very existence depends on the implicit devaluation of non-celebrities; the CNBC-style telejournalism which reduces the global economy to the chatter of wealthy white male stockholders retailing the retailing of retailing on behalf of even wealthier (and whiter) male stockholders; or the business culture of the giant multinationals or multis, which is open to any cultural group just as long as they swear fealty to the commodity form.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995