Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

Holzer, possibly, was highlighting how that cycle of desire and disappointment helps keep capitalism in business: we need to be protected from being corrupted by desire in general, and by shopping in particular.

What capitalism realised was that it didn’t need to be tough, but seductive.

By maintaining a cool, affectless stance, irony colludes, unconsciously or otherwise, with what it overtly disdains.

Everything is up for grabs, for sale at the right price, because there is nothing outside the market.

Neoliberalism is at once more efficient than the totalitarian system of control that Orwell satirised in Nineteen Eighty-Four and more insidious, since it makes its subjects into ones who imagine themselves to be free while at the same time desiring their own domination.

three of these shocks demonstrate how the rise of neoliberalism

reassert their mastery, the upper classes overturned Fordism

But one reason the state should dare to do more than Nozick allows is that we are better thought of not as inviolate individuals, but rather as violated individuals, thrown into a world with parents, traits and a level of wealth we did not choose, incapable of realising our ends or conception of ourselves – still less living lives of dignity – without assistance.

‘To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.’

To make a movie is murder at the rate of twenty-four frames per second.

23 Images are narcotising, encouraging us to consume them in aesthetic delight rather than spurring us to take collective action to remedy social wrongs.

Just as a courtroom, for Sekula, is a battleground of fictions each fighting to be named the truth, so the photographic image is always composed, edited or selected to serve a political agenda, especially when that agenda is erased by claims that it offers incontrovertible reality.

Social truth is something other than a matter of convincing style’,

Meaning wasn’t a butterfly that could be pinned down, but a corrosive substance that no container could hold for long.