The street migrates into the living room

So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life bursts not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work (for they have the faculty of making their bodies tables). Housekeeping utensils hang from balconies like potted plants. From the windows of the top floors come baskets on ropes for mail, fruit, and cabbage. 

Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so, only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room. 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 174 

Building and action interpenetrate

As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its "thus and not otherwise". 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 169

En flyttande människa är inte rotlös

 Alla vet att en flyttande människa inte är rotlös – hon flyttar bara mellan olika hem.

Det finns en hisnande motsättning i de svenska myndigheternas tolkning av ordet "nomad". Eftersom nomader per definition är människor som flyttar, anses de kunna flyttas på.

Elin Anna Labba, Herrarna satte oss hit (Norstedts, 2020) p. 71

The things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

The notion of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network – a "biospheric web" wherein each entity draws its specific character from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others – has today become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty's late description of sesnuous reality, "the Flesh," as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part.

It is this dynamic, interconnected reality that provokes and sustains all our speaking, lending something of its structure to all our various languages. The enigmatic nature of language echoes and "prolongs unto the invisible" the wild, interpenetrating, interdependent nature of the sensible landscape itself.

Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths. "Language is a life, is our life and the life of the things..." It is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 85

it is not human language that is primary

Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84

Language is an evolving medium we collectively inhabit

While individual speech acts are surely guided by the structured lattice of the language, that lattice is nothing other than the sedimented result of all previous acts of speech, and will itself be altered by the very expressive activity it now guides. Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84

Becoming animal

'Becoming animal' does not mean imitating an animal. Again, it is not about given animal forms but about animal capacities and powers. To become animal is to be drawn into a zone of action or passion that one can have in common with an animal. It is a matter of unlearning physical and emotional habits and learning to take on new ones such that one enlarges the scope of one's relationships and responses to the world.

Christoph Cox, 'Of Humans, Animals and Monsters' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 122

Livets ande bor ännu i de döda tingen

Om döda ting älska, om jord och vatten skilja vänner från fiender, ville jag gärna äga deras kärlek. jag ville, att den gröna jorden inte kände mina steg som en tung börda. Jag ville, att hon gärna förläte, att hon för min skull såras med plog och harv, och att hon villigt öppnade sig för min döda kropp. Och jag ville, att vågen, vars blanka spegel sönderslås av mina åror, hade samma tålamod med mig, som en mor har med ett ivrigt barn, när det klättrar upp i hennes knä utan att akta högtidsdräktens oskrynklade siden. Med den klara luften, som dallrar över de blåa bergen, ville jag vara vän och med den blänkande solen och de vackra stjärnorna. Ty det synes mig ofta, som om de döda tingen skulle känna och lida med de levande. Inte är skrankan mellan dem och oss så stor, som människor tro. Vilken del av jordens stoft är det, som inte har varit inne i livets kretsgång? Har inte vägens kringdrivande stoft smekts som mjukt hår, älskats som goda, välgörande händer? Har inte vattnet i hjulspåret fordom strömmat som blod genom klappande hjärtan?

Livets ande bor ännu i de döda tingen. Vad förnimmer han, där han slumrar i drömlös sömn?

Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga (Modernista, 2017) p.328

Skönhet och ingenting annat fordrar vi av livet

Ve mig, ve oss alla, Värmlands barn! Skönhet, skönhet och ingenting annat fordrar vi av livet. Vi, barn av försakelsen, av allvaret, av fattigdomen, höjer våra händer i en enda lång bön och begär detta enda goda, skönhet. Må livet vara som en rosenbuske, blomstra av kärlek, vin och nöjen, och må dess rosor stå varje man till buds! Se, detta önskar vi, och vårt land bär stränghetens, allvarets, försakelsens drag. Vårt land är grubblets eviga symbol, men vi har inga tankar.

Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga (Modernista, 2017) p.285

Själviakttagelsens underliga ande

Men vi tänkte, vi, på själviakttagelsens underliga ande, som redan hade hållit sitt intåg i vårt inre. Vi tänkte på honom med isögonen och de långa, krokiga fingrarna, han, som sitter där inne i själens mörkaste vrå och plockar sönder vår varelse, såsom gamla kvinnor plocka sönder lappar av siden och ylle.

Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga (Modernista, 2017) p. 118

There is no hospitable house

There is almost an axiom of self-limitation or self-contradiction in the law of hospitality. As a reaffirmation of mastery and being oneself in one's own home, from the outset hospitality limits itself at its very beginning, it remains forever on the threshold of itself, it governs the threshold – and hence it forbids in some way even what it seems to allow to cross the threshold to pass across it. It becomes the threshold. This is why we do not know what it is, and why we cannot know. Once we know it, we no longer know it, what it properly is, what the threshold of its identity is.

To take up the figure of the door, for there to be hospitality, there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality. There is no hospitable house. There is no house without doors and windows. But as soon as there are a door and windows, it means that someone has the key to them and consequently controls the conditions of hospitality. There must be a threshold. But if there is a threshold there is no longer hospitality. This is the difference,  the gap, between the hospitality of invitation and the hospitality of visitation. In visitation there is no door. Anyeon can come at any time and can come in without needing a key for the door. There are no customs checks with a visitation. But there are customs and police checks with an invitation. Hospitality thus becomes the threshold or the door.

Jacques Derrida, 'Hostipitality' in Angelaki, journal of the theoretical humanities, volume 5, number 3 (Routledge, 2000) p. 14

Sustainability and diversity are ecologically linked

Sustainability and diversity are ecologically linked because diversity offers the multiplicity of interactions which can heal ecological disturbance to any part of the system.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p.147

Maximising of one-dimensional output is an economic imperative

The low productivity of diverse, multi-dimensional systems and the high productivity of uniform, one-dimensional systems of agriculture, forestry and livestock is therefore not a neutral, scientific measure but is biased towards the commercial interests for whom maximising of one-dimensional output is an economic imperative.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p.140

Biodiversity cannot be conserved unless production itself is based on a policy of preserving diversity.

Biodiversity conservation here is seen only in terms of setting aside reserves in undisturbed ecosystems for the purpose of conservation. This schizophrenic approach to biodiversity, which adopts a policy of destruction in production processes and a policy of preservation in 'set-asides', cannot be effective in the conservation of species diversity. Biodiversity cannot be conserved unless production itself is based on a policy of preserving diversity.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) pp. 86-87

The reductionism of scientific forestry

'Scientific forestry' was the false universalization of a local tradition of forestry which emerged from the narrow commercial interests whcih viewed the forest only in terms of commercially valuable wood. It first reduced the value of diversity of life in the forest to the value of a few commercially valuable species, and further reduced the value of these species to the value of their dead product – wood. The reductionism of the scientific forestry paradigm created by commercial industrial interests violates both the integrity of the forests and the integrity of forest cultures who need the forests in its diversity to satisfy their needs for food, fibre and shelter.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p. 18