Miguel

“If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

“The labor we delight in physics pain.”
― Shakespeare, Macbeth: Readers' Edition

“I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know.

This is where I arrive at the meaning of the word "subject" in analytic discourse. What speaks without knowing it makes me "I," subject of the verb. That doesn't suffice to bring me into being. That has nothing to do with what I am forced to put in — enough knowledge for it to hold up, but not one drop more.”
― Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore

“Negativity as a source for social theory tends to reject the impulses to repair social relations that appear to us irreparable, and in that light, our work might seem quietistic, apolitical, nihilist, defeatist, or even irresponsible. By engaging closely with sociality and with our own deep-rooted tendencies to think about its zones of optimism and longing, we are seeking to make a persuasive case for the necessity of recognizing the importance of addressing structural antagonisms in any analytic of the social. In doing so, we seek to affirm negativity's central role in any antinormative politics. We hope this conversation might permit a reframing of the antisocial thesis that has already generated such lively debate and so much important theoretical work by its critics and adherents alike. Part”
― Lauren Berlant, Sex, or the Unbearable