Best 4 quotes of Dennis Redmond on MyQuotes

No. 2’s infamous opening line is a double gambit: the Village does not really want information, of course, only obedience. (From their point of view, information is an exchange-value, not a use-value). In fact, it is No. 6 who truly wants information: information on who No. 1 is, where the Village really is, which side runs it, and how it might be possible to escape.

Secondly, there’s no question but that the speculative drive of the post-structuralisms and postmodernisms harmonized, on some deep level, with the real life financial speculations of Wall Street. At their best, the postmodernisms were the critical meditation and reflection upon those speculations (as with Jameson’s classic essay on postmodernism); at their worst, they were little more than the media-chatter of academic superstars shielded from the grim realities of economic austerity, skyrocketing tuition and rampant privatization – realities which had begun to undercut the very existence of autonomous national literary, philosophical and cultural departments, as tenured and full-time positions were slashed to make way for vast pools of contingent and adjunct academic workers.

…the end of the Cold War has brought not prosperity for all but a pitiless economic struggle for pole-position on the food chain of information capitalism. The neoliberalism and neocolonialism of the 1990s are the direct heir of the Manchester liberalism and colonialism of the 1890s, the only difference being that whereas Victorian rentiers extracted their Imperial textile-rents from the labor of the Great Unwashed, their postmodern analogues on Wall Street speculate on the viewing-rents of the Great Unwatched.

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.