Critical Theory Quotes

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

~ Guy Debord

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

~ Guy Debord

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

~ Guy Debord

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

~ Guy Debord

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

~ Theodor W. Adorno

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

~ Guy Debord

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.

~ Walter Benjamin

Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.

~ Robin Morgan

Visibility is a trap.

~ Michel Foucault

Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of our culture, we would need to be standing at some Archimedean point beyond it. What this fails to see is that reflecting critically on our situation is part of our situation. It is a feature of the peculiar way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves when we are not there. Curving back on ourselves is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of our own skin. Without such self-monitoring we would not have survived as a species.

~ Terry Eagleton

For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon.

~ Grafton Tanner

The notion that capital – as an infinitely ramified system of exploitation, an abstract, intangible but overpowering logic, a process without a subject or a subject without a face – poses formidable obstacles to its representation has often been taken in a sublime or tragic key. *Vast*, beyond the powers of individual or collective cognition; *invisible*, in its fundamental forms; *overwhelming*, in its capacity to reshape space, time and matter – but unlike the sublime, or indeed the tragic, in its propensity to thwart any reaffirmation of the uniqueness and interiority of a subject. Not a shipwreck *with* a spectator, but a shipwreck *of* the spectator.

~ Alberto Toscano

Critical feedback shared in good faith is inherently a constructive dialogue. A “critique,” a term that is both a noun and a verb, represents the systematical application of critical thought, a disciplined method of analysis, expressing of opinions, and rendering judgments.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can “inject” an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is therea corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be “sub-critical,” i.e. to correspond in this analogy to pilesof sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole “theory” consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals’ minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, “Can a machine be made to be super-critical?

~ Alan Turing

There are no pessimists, there are only realists and liars.

~ Paul Virilio