Curated for Communication students. Write those papers with pride!

10 quotes from academic writers a week. These are just some quotes from familiar faces throughout my undergrad, and some new ones that I find interesting.

I find Nick Land and Sadie Plant's writings incredibly alluring, they’re fearfully stimulating. I would however not cite them in any academic work in undergrad. More so due to my own uncertainty. I’m not sure if their latter work is even academic, it takes on a more prophetic and delirious tone.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — Walter Benjamin (1935)

The uniqueness of the work of art is identical with an embeddedness in the context of tradition. Tradition itself is of course something very much alive, something extraordinarily changeable. (p.12)

The Dark Enlightenment — Nick Land (1992)

The regular, excruciating, soul-crushing humiliation of conservatism on the race issue should come as no surprise to anybody. After all, the principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated. That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for. (p.40)

Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as Traps — Nick Seaver (2018)

People may be irrational, but they are still predictable, and where there is prediction, there is the potential for profit. (p.424)

The Human Condition — Hannah Arendt (1958)

The idolization of genius harbours the same degradation of the human person as the other tenets prevalent in a commercial society. (p.210)

The Culture Industry — Theodor Adorno (1944)

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended.

People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them.

They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured.

Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all. (p.103)

zeros + ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture — Sadie Plant (1997)

While it dates from the engines of the mechanical age, engineering is not confined to the use and manufacture of machines in factories dedicated to the task. As its subsequent associations with electronics, chemicals, software, and genetics imply, it was merely passing through the tools and devices of the mechanical age. Nor is it a process which began at this point: engineering may have been newly defined among the levers, cogs, and automata of the eighteenth century, but the line on which it runs was not invented here.

Engineering travels on experimental routes which throw back to the skills of lost shamanic cultures, the trials and errors of alchemy, and brews condemned for witchcraft in the centuries before the Enlightenment. (p.77 - Cocoons)

Meltdown — Nick Land (1994)

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

Good Entertainment — Byung-Chul Han (2019)

The totalization of entertainment leads to a hedonistic world that the spirit of passion interprets as, disparages as, abasement, invalidation, nonbeing.

And yet, in their essence, passion and entertainment are not entirely different. The pure meaninglessness of entertainment is adjacent to the pure meaning of passion. (p.1)

The Society of the Spectacle — Guy Debord (1967)

The proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity.

Trinkets such as key chains which come as free bonuses with the purchase of some luxury product, but which end up being traded back and forth as valued collectibles in their own right, reflect a mystical selfabandonment to commodity transcendence.

Those who collect the trinkets that have been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating commodity indulgences-glorious tokens of the commodity's real presence among the faithful. (67)

The Ecstasy of Communication — Jean Baudrillard (1987)

The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity.

What characterizes him is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said: but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle.

He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence. (p.33)