Here too Munch’s painting [The Scream] stands as a complex reflection on this complicated situation: it shows us that expression requires the category of the individual monad, but it also shows us the heavy price to be paid for that precondition, dramatizing the unhappy paradox that when you constitute your individual subjectivity as a self-sufficient field and a closed realm, you therebv shut yourself off from everything else and condemn yourself to the mindless solitude of the monad, buried alive and condemned to a prison cell without egress.

Postmodernism presumably signals the end of this dilemma, which it replaces with a new one. The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego – what I have been calling the waning of affect. [...] As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991) p. 15

To work out a relationship to the modern which neither amounts to a nostalgic call to return to it nor an oedipal denunciation of its repressive insufficiencies – this is a rich mission for our historicity, and success in it might help us to recover some sense of the future as well as of the possibilities of genuine change.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 90

When we speak of the 'end of history', the 'end of the political', the 'end of the social', the 'end of ideologies', none of this is true. The worst of it all is precisely that there will be no end to anything, and all these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously, recurrently, in that hysteresis of everything which, like nails and hair, continues to grow after death. Because, at bottom, all these things are already dead and, rather than have a happy or tragic resolution, a destiny, we shall have a thwarted end, a homeopathic end, an end distilled into all the various metastases of the refusal of death.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 116

The whole problem of speaking about the end (particularly the end of history) is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. This paradox is produced by the fact that in a non-linear, non-Euclidean space of history the end cannot be located. The end is, in fact, only conceivable in a logical order of causality and continuity. Now, it is events themselves which, by their artificial production, their programmed occurrence or the anticipation of their effects – not to mention their transfiguration in the media – are suppressing the cause-effect relation and hence all historical continuity.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 110

One of the aspects of this mania for accomplishment is the elevation to the universal, which is commonly regarded as progress, as constituting in a way the extensional equivalent of immortality. This extension actually amounts to a dilution and extenuation of values in the universal. The same goes for events: it is when they are disseminated worldwide that their intensity is at its weakest and they are most rapidly obsolescent. The universalization of facts, data, knowledge, information is a precondition of their disappearance. Every idea and culture becomes universalized before it disappears. As with stars: their maximum expansion comes at the point of death, their transformation into red giants and then black dwarfs. The death agony of concentrated solutions in high dilution, the death agony of forms and images in high definition.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 104

In the past, man thought himself immortal, but he was not. Or rather he secretly doubted that he was not. Otherwise, he would not have needed to believe it. Today, we no longer believe we are immortal, yet it is precisely now that we are becoming so, becoming quietly immortal without knowing it, without wishing it, without believing it, by the mere fact of the confusion of the limits of life and death. No longer immortal in terms of the soul, which has disappeared, nor even in terms of the body, which is disappearing, but in terms of the formula, immortal in terms of the code. That is, we are beings for whom there will soon no longer be death, nor representation of death, nor even – and this is the worst – illusion of death.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 99

A contradictory dual operation: man, alone of all species, is seeking to construct his immortal double, an unprecedented artificial species. He caps natural selection with an artificial super-selection, claiming the sole possession of a soul and a consciousness and, at the same time, he is putting an end to natural selection which entailed the death of each species in accordance with the law of evolution. In ending evolution (of all species including his own), he is contravening the symbolic rule and hence truly deserves to disappear. And this is without doubt the destiny he is preparing for himself, in a roundabout way, in that, in his arrogant desire to end evolution, man is ushering in involution and the revival of inhuman, biogenetic forms.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 84

Capital has cannibalized all negativity, that of history and that of work in a – literally – sarcastic fashion: devouring the very substance of the human being to transform it into its essence as productive being. It has unceremoniously devoured the dialectic by parodistically taking the opposing terms upon itself, by parodistically going beyond its own contradictions.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 52

There is in fact no insoluble waste problem. The problem is resolved by the post-modern invention of recycling and the incinerator. The Great Incinerators of history, from whose ashes the Phoenix of post-modernity is resuscitated! We have to come to terms with the idea that everything that was not degradable or exterminable is today recyclable, and hence that there is no final solution. We shall not be spared the worst – that is, History will not come to an end – since the leftovers, all the leftovers – the Church, communism, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies – are indefinitely recyclable. What is stupendous is that nothing one thought superseded by history has really disappeared. All the archaic, anachronistic forms are there ready to re-emerge, intact and timeless, like the viruses deep in the body. History has only wrenched itself form cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 27

In the Euclidean space of history, the shortest path between two points is the straight line, the line of Progress and Democracy. But this is only true of the linear space of the Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean fin de siècle space, a baleful curvature unfailingly deflects all trajectories. This is doubtless linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century, just as the earth's sphericity is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or the subtle distortion of the gravitational field.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 10

The fact that we are leaving history to move into the realm of simulation is merely a consequence of the fact that history itself has always, deep down, been an immense simulation model. Not in the sense that it could be said only to have existed in the narrative made of it or the interpretation given, but with regard to the time in which it unfolds – that linear time which is at once the time of an ending and of the unlimited suspending of the end. The only kind of time in which a history can take place, if, by history, we understand a succession of non-meaningless facts, each engendering he other by cause and effect, but doing so without any absolute necessity and all standing open to the future, unevenly poised. So different from time in ritual societies where the end of everything is in its beginning and ceremony retraces the perfection of that original event. In contrast to this fulfilled order of time, the liberation of the 'real' time of history, the production of a linear, deferred time may seem a purely artificial process.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 7

We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 82

Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value. But justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 66

Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. it is producing not the known, but the unknown. And it suggests a model of legitimation that has nothing to do with maximized performance, but has as its basis difference understood as paralogy.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 60

But Man cannot really become immortal. It is the being of what is negated that passes into the negation and realizes its result. Thus, by (actively) negating the real natural World, Man can create a historical or human ("technical") World, which is just as real, although real in a different way. But death is pure Nothingness, and it subsists only as concept of death (= presence of the absence of life). Now, by negating a concept, one only manages to create another concept. Hence Man who negates his death can only "imagine" himself immortal: he can only believe in his "eternal" life or his "resurrection," but he cannot really live his imaginary "afterlife." But this faith, whose counterpart and origin are the faculty of freely bringing about one's death, also distinguishes Man from animal. Man is not only the sole living being which knows that it must die and which can freely bring about its death: he is also the only one which can aspire to immortality and believe in it more or less firmly.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 256

If, then, death is a manifestation of Negativity in Men (or more exactly, a manifestation of Man's Negativity), it is a transformation of his real being into ideal concept. It is because he is mortal that Man can conceive (begreifen) of himself as he is in reality – that is, precisely as mortal: in contradistinction to animals, he thinks of himself as mortal, and therefore he thinks of his own death. Hence he can "transcend" it, if you please, and situate himself somehow beyond it; but he does this in the only way in which one can "go beyond" given-Being without sinking into pure Nothingness, namely in and by thought.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 254

For History to exist, there must be not only a given reality, but also a negation of that reality and at the same time a ("sublimated") preservation of what has been negated. For only then is evolution creative; only then do a true continuity and a real progress exist in it. And this is precisely what distinguishes human History from a simple biological or "natural" evolution. Now, to preserv oneself as negated is to remember what one has been even while one is becoming radically other. It is by historical memory that Man's identity preserves itself throughout History, in spite of the auto-negations which are accomplished in it, so that he can realize himself by means of History as the integration of his contradictory past or as totality, or, better, as dialectical entity. Hence history is always a conscious and willed tradition, and all real history also manifests itself as a historiography: there is no History without conscious, lived historical memory.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 232

The Concept is Time. Time in the full sense of the term – that is, a Time in which there is a Future also in the full sense – that is, a Future that will never become either present or past. Man is the empirical existence of the concept in the world. Therefore, he is the empirical existence in the world of a Future that will never become present. Now, this Future, for Man, is his death, that Future of his which will never become his present; and the only reality or real presence of this Future is the knowledge that Man has in the present of his future death. Therefore, if Man is Concept and if the Concept is Time (that is, if Man is an essentially temporal being), Man is essentially mortal; and he is Concept, that is, absolute Knowledge or Wisdom incarnate, only if he knows this. Logos becomes flesh, becomes Man, only on the condition of being willing and able to die.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) pp. 147-148

Hegel says, then, that Time is something, an X, that exists empirically. Now, this assertion can be deduced from the very analysis of the Hegelian notion of (historical) Time. Time in which the Future takes primacy can be realized, can exist, only provided that it negates or annihilates. In order that Time may exist, therefore, there must also be something other than Time. This other thing is first of all Space (as it were, the place where things are stopped). Therefore: no Time without Space; Time is something that is in Space. Time is the negation of Space (of diversity); but if it is something and not nothingness, it is because it is the negation of Space. Now, only that which really exists – that is, which resists – can be really negated. But space that resists is full: it is extended matter, it is real Space – that is, the natural World. Therefore, Time must exist in a World: it is indeed, then, something which "ist da,"as Hegel says, which is there in a Space, and which is there in empirical Space – that is, in a sensible Space or a natural World. Time annihilates this world by causing it at every instant to sink into the nothingness of the past. But Time is nothing but this nihilation of the World; and if there were no real World that was annihilated, Time would only be pure nothingness: there would be no Time. Hence Time that is, therefore, is indeed something that "exists empirically" – i.e., exists in a real Space or a spatial World.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) pp. 136-137

It may be that the Time in which the Present takes primacy is cosmic or physical Time, whereas biological Time would be characterized by the primacy of the Past. It does seem that the physical or cosmic object is but a simple presence (Gegenwart), whereas the fundamental biological phenomenon is probably Memory in the broad sense, and the specifically human phenomenon is without a doubt the Project. Moreover, it could be that the cosmic and biological forms of Time exist as Time only in relation to Man – that is, in relation to historical Time.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 134

In the Phenomenology, Hegel is very radical. As a matter of fact, he says that Nature is Space, whereas Time is History. In other words: there is no natural, cosmic Time; there is Time only to the extent that there is History, that is, human existence – that is, speaking existence. Man who, in the course of History, reveals Being by his Discourse, is the "empirically existing Concept" (der daseiende Begriff), and Time is nothing other than this Concept. Without Man, Nature would be Space, and only Space. Only Man is in Time, and Time does not exist outside of Man; therefore, Man is Time, and Time is Man – that is, the "Concept which is there in the [spatial] empirical existence" of Nature (der Begriff der da ist).

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 133

The bourgeois Worker presupposes – and conditions an Entsagung, an Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private property, of Capital, which – while being the Property-owner's own product – becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference, however, that the enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 68

Now, to attribute an absolute value to a being not in relation to what he does, to his acts, but simply because he is, beceuse of the simple fact of his Sein, his Being – is to love him. Hence we can also say that Love is what is realized in and by the ancient Family. And since Love does not depend on the acts, on the activity of the loved one, it cannot be ended by his very death. By loving man in his inaction, one considers him as if he were dead. Hence death can change nothing in the Love, in the value attributed in and by the Family. And that is why Love and the worship of the dead have their place within the pagan Family.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 61

Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 38

Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. Therefore, it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is "incarnated" Spirit, he is historical "World", he is "objectivized" History.

Friedrich Hegel, "Autonomy and Dependence of Selfconsciousness: Mastery and Slavery" in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 25

Thus, in the relationship between man and women, for example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants "to possess" or "to assimilate" the Desire taken as Desire – that is to say, if he wants to be "desired" or "loved," or, rather, "recognized" in his human value, in his reality as a human individual. Likewise, Desire directed toward a natural obiect is human only to the extent that it is "mediated" by the Desire of another directed toward the same obiect: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal reality, is created only by action that satisfies such Desires: human history is the history of desired Desires.

Friedrich Hegel, "Autonomy and Dependence of Selfconsciousness: Mastery and Slavery" in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 6

For there to be Self-Consciousness, Desire must therefore be directed toward a non-natural object, toward something that goes beyond the given reality. Now, the only thing that goes beyond the given reality is Desire itself. For Desire taken as Desire – i.e., before its satisfaction – is but a revealed nothingness, an unreal emptiness. Desire, being the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality, is something essentially different from the desired thing, something other than a thing, than a static and given real being that stays eternally identical to itself. Therefore, Desire directed toward another Desire, taken as Desire, will create, by the negating and assimilating action that satisfies it, an I essentially different from the animal "I".

Friedrich Hegel, "Autonomy and Dependence of Selfconsciousness: Mastery and Slavery" in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 5

In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the "negation," the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object: to satisfy hunger, for example, the food must be destroyed or, in any case, transformed. Thus, all action is "negating." Far from leaving the given as it is, action destroys it; if not in its being, at least in its given form. And all "negating-negativity" with respect to the given is necessarily active. But negating action is not purely destructive, for if action destroys an objective reality, for the sake of satisfying the Desire from which it is born, it creates in its place, in and by that very destruction, a subjective reality. The being that eats, for example, creates and preserves its own reality by the overcoming of a reality other than its own, by the "transformation" of an alien reality into its own reality, by the "assimilation," the "internalization" of a "foreign," "external" reality. Generally speaking, the I of Desire is an emptiness that receives a real positive content only by negating action that satisfies Desire in destroying, transforming, and "assimilating" the desired non-I.

Friedrich Hegel, "Autonomy and Dependence of Selfconsciousness: Mastery and Slavery" in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 4

Against the postmodernist suspicion of grand narratives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated, contingent problems, these are all the effects of a single systemic cause: Capital. We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically, as well as geographically, ubiquitous.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 77

But this impasse – it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic – is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals – but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) pp. 69-70

The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot's claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 3

This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious 'end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a 'terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) pp. 6-7

So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behaviour precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 13

'With the breakdown of the signifying chain', Jameson summarized, 'the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time'. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s – i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture – a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 25

Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that's the very problem. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject – a collective subject – does not exist, yet the crisis, like all other global crises we're now facing, demands that it be constructed. Yet the appeal to ethical immediacy that has been in place in British political culture since at least 1985 – when the consensual sentimentality of Live Aid replaced the antagonism of the Miners Strike – permanently defers the emergence of such a subject.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 66

The present generation thinks it has found history, it thinks it is even overburdened with history. It moans about historicism – lucus a non lucendo. Something is called history which is not history at all. According to the present, because everything is dissolved into history, one must attain the supra-historical again. It is not enough that contemporary Dasein has lost itself in the present pseudo-history, it also has to use the last remainder of its temporality (i.e., of Dasein) in order entirely to steal away from time, from Dasein. And it is on this fantastical path to supra-historicity that we are supposed to find Weltanschauung. (This is the uncanniness that constitutes the time of the present.)

Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1992) p. 20E

For a long time I've walked through this world with the desire, like in 'Rear Window' , to look into other people's lives because I know that there is a way in which I am the same as so many of the strangers that I see. Oftentimes I just think of making music as a way of illuminating those connections. You don't know. That's the thrill of making a record-- to see. I don't have to walk anonymously by this corner anymore because the man on this corner and I have a deeper connection that we didn't have a way of addressing before. I know for a fucking fact that I am not alone and sometimes everybody feels alone but we have to know that we aren't. And rather than giving that responsibility for assuring us that we are not alone over to the incapable hands of organized religion, let's do it ourselves and say, "What's the connection?"

Will Oldham, Interview with Pitchfork, 2011-10-10

In our time anyone who says population in place of people or race, and privately owned land in place of soil, is by that simple act withdrawing his support from a great many lies. He is taking away from these words their rotten, mystical implications. The word people (Volk) implies a certain unity and certain common interests; it should therefore be used only when we are speaking of a number of peoples, for then alone is anything like community of interest conceivable. The population of a given territory may have a good many different and even opposed interests – and this is a truth that is being suppressed. In like manner, whoever speaks of soil and describes vividly the effect of ploughed fields upon nose and eyes, stressing the smell and colour of earth, is supporting the rulers' lies. For the fertility of the soil is not the question, nor men's love for the soil, nor their industry in working it; what is of prime importance is the price of grain and the price of labour. Those who extract profits from the soil are not the same people who extract grain from it, and the earthy smell of a turned furrow is unknown on the produce exchanges. The latter have another smell entirely [...]

Bertolt Brecht, 'Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties' in Hans Haacke (Phaidon, 2004) pp. 96-97

But the notion of 'the end of history' also expresses a blockage of the historical imagination, and we need to see more clearly how that is so, and how it ends up seeming to offer only this particular concept as a viable alternative. It seems to me particularly significant that the emergence of late capitalism [...], along with the consequent collapse of the communist systems in the East, coincided with a generalized and planetary ecological disaster. It is not particularly the rise of the ecological movements I have in mind here [...]; rather, it is the end of a Promethean conception of production that seems to me significant, in the way that it makes it difficult for people today to continue to imagine development as a conquest of nature.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 91

The function of the sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is taken over by Theory; but this also leaves room for the survival of art's other half, namely the Beautiful, which now invests the cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the modern has gradually dried up. This is the other face of postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in the modern, of jouissance). Both Theory and the Beautiful are constituent elements of that 'end of art' which was the postmodern.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 86

Imagine models floating above each other as in distinct dimensions: it is not their homologies that prove suggestive or fruitful, but rather the infinitesimal divergences, the imperceptible lack of fit between the levels – extrapolated out into a continuum whose stages range from the pre-choate and the quizzical gap, to the nagging tension and the sharpness of contradiction itself – genuine thinking always taking place within empty places, these voids that suddenly appear between the most powerful conceptual schemes. Thinking is thus not the concept, but the breakdown in the relationships between the individual concepts, isolated in their splendour like so many galactic systems, drifting apart in the empty mind of the world.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 76

One cannot, consequently, admit the crude separation of sciences and arts prescribed by modern Western culture. As we know, it has as its corollary the relegation of the arts and literature to the miserable function of distracting human beings from what hounds and harasses them all the time, i.e. the obsession of controlling time. [...] It must never be forgotten that if thinking indeed consists in receiving the event, it follows that no-one can claim to think without being ipso facto in a position of resistance to the procedures for controlling time.

To think is to question everything, including thought, and question, and the process. To question requires that something happen that reason has not yet known. In thinking, one accepts the occurrence for what it is: 'not yet' determined. One does not prejudge it, and there is no security. Peregrination in the desert. One cannot write without bearing witness to the abyss of time in its coming.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 74

Modernity is not, I think, a historical period, but a way of shaping a sequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rate of contingency.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 68

It scarcely seems that this generalized accessibility offered by the new cultural goods is strictly speaking a progress. The penetration of techno-scientific apparatus into the cultural field in no way signifies an increase of knowledge, sensibility, tolerance and liberty. Reinforcing this apparatus does not liberate the spirit, as the Aufklärung thought. Experience shows rather the reverse: a new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new poverty, merciless remodelling of opinion by the media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul, as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno repeatedly stressed.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 63

Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 34

For it is of the essence of desire to desire also to free iself of itself, because desire is intolerable. So one believes one can put an end to desire, and one fulfils its end (this is the ambiguity of the word end, aim and cessation: the same ambiguity as with desire). One tries to remember, and this is probably a good way of forgetting again.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 29

The striking thing about this metaphysics of development is that it needs no finality. Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason and of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. [...] It has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance.

It has thus no end, but it does have a limit, the expectation of the life of the sun. The anticipated explosion of this star is the only challenge objectively posed to development.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 7

Consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. xxv

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador, 2010) p. 263-264

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador, 2010) p. 258-259

To believe in God is, therefore, to doubt his existence, his manifestness, his presence. In fact, faith is the spiritual impulse which reveals the profoundest uncertainty about the existence of God (but it is the same with all theological virtues: hope is the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest despair at the real state of things and charity the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest contempt for others).

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.92

It is generally thought that the obsession with survival is a logical consequence of life and the right to life. But, most of the time, the two things are contradictory. Life is not a question of rights, and what follows on from life is not survival, which is artificial, but death. it is only by paying the price of a failure to live, a failure to take pleasure, a failure to die that man is assured of survival.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.87

The effects produced by the finite nature of the earth, for the first time contrasting violently with the infinity of our development, are such that our species is automatically switching over to collective suicide.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.83

If God exists, there is no need to believe in Him. If people do believe in Him, this is because the self-evidence of his existence has passed away. Thus, when people obtain the right to life, the fact is that they are no longer able to live. When nature is recognized as a subject in law, as it is by Michel Serres, we have objectified it to death, and this ecological cover merely asserts our right to go on doing so.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.80

It is not just material substances, including nuclear ones, which pose a waste problem but also the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas which continue to pollute our mental space. Historical and intellectual refuse pose an even more serious problem than industrial waste. Who will rid us of the sedimentations of centuries of stupidity?

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.26

The beam of memory bends, and makes every event a black hole.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.20

Det var icke en lögn men det har blivit. När du var ung, moder, hade du rätt, när jag blir gammal, ja, då har jag kanske orätt! Man växer inte i kapp med tiden!

August Strindberg, Mäster Olof (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1949) p. 70

Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning – this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the 'figure in the carpet'. The Vanishing Point of Language.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 52

Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance – not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice (Hegel). It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it has disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and – this is the worst of it – continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 22

Thus, the modern world foreseen by Marx, driven on by the work of the negative, by the engine of contradiction, became, by the very excess of its fulfilment, another world in which things no longer even need their opposites to exist, in which light no longer needs shade, the feminine no longer needs the masculine (or vice versa?), good no longer needs evil – and the world no longer needs us.

It is here we see that the mode of disappearance of the human [...] is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built-in obsolescence, of the human race's fulfilment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge. We see, too, that is this which precipitates it towards its disappearance, much more quickly than animal species, by the acceleration it imparts to an evolution that no longer has anything natural about it.

Doing so not out of some death drive or some involutive, regressive disposition toward undifferentiated forms, but from an impulse to go as far as possible in the expression of all its power, all its faculties – to the point even of dreaming of abolishing death.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) pp. 16-19

The dynamic of modern societies rests on a perpetual flight into the future which creates an illusion of stability; it holds together an organism in a perpeptual state of transformation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 101

Nowadays, with the most wonderful communications equipment imaginable, we are broadcasting a culture which is at best an absence of culture, a product of chance.

Jacques Ellul, as quoted in Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 97

The idea that generalized aggression can be refined into peaceful competition, profitable to all, is the great myth of liberalism, and it assumes that the hypothesis of the harmony of interests is proven – which is far from being the case – and that the search for wealth is an end in itself, unconnected with the will to power and the struggle for power – a notion which is immediately contradicted by observation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 75

The aim of bourgeois ethics, to eliminate all forms of death and impose the value of life, without qualification, could only take root where biological death was actually seen as undesirable. Of course, traditional societies attach strong meaning to death, poverty or sickness; but the exalting of biological life as the supreme value is inhuman and, by its qualitative density, destroys the very meaning of existence. The West, by disenchanting the world, has made life on this earth into the value par excellence. When you no longer have eternity before you, life becomes an anxious struggle against time. Earthly time may become infinite, but this infiniteness only gives unlimited scope to the anxiety of modern man. The infinite accumulation of works is a phantasmagorical substitute for immortality. This obsessive fight against time, disregarding the enjoyment of the present moment, is characteristic of Western man.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) pp. 55-56

Modern society, by 'inventing' economics – i.e. by creating an autonomous 'sphere' for the production, distribution and consumtion of material wealth, a sphere in which it is legitimate and necessary to allocate means as efficiently as possible – has reduced culture to the narrower preoccupations of the 'Ministries of Culture' possessed by many civilized nations. This reduction originates in Western metaphysics, which, since Plato, have been accustomed to splitting the unity of being into matter and spirit. This presumably means that culture becomes no more than the awareness (perhaps a false awareness) which a society has of its 'material' practices through religion, art and all its means of expression.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 39

Vad har gjort det omöjligt för oss att leva i tiden så som fiskarna i vattnet, så som fåglarna i luften, så som barn? Det är kejsardömets fel! Idén att upprätta och bevara ett kejsardöme har skapat historiens tid. Kejsardömet har inte förlagt sin existens till årstidscykelns mjukt återkommande tid, utan till ryckig tid som hör samman med uppgång och fall, med början och slut, med katastrof. Kejsardömet dömer sig att leva i historien och stämpla mot historien. Endast en tanke upptar kejsardömets undermedvetna: hur det ska bära sig åt för att inte upphöra, inte dö, utan förlänga sin era.

J. M. Coetzee, I Väntan På Barbarerna (Brombergs, 2002) p. 177

But we do not repeat a beginning by reducing it to something past and now known, which need merely be initiated; no, the beginning must be begun again, more radically, with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that attend a true beginning.

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Anchor Books, 1961) p. 32

All capitalists and financiers, as well as any homo economicus (meaning all of us), tend to become ordinary 'criminals' who collude to some extent in the economic banality of evil.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity, 2009) p.19

No, I don't believe in History as an upwards progression… and that, upon reaching paradise – represented by the last judgment, or by communism – History ceases to exist.

Anselm Kiefer, 'With History Under His Skin', in Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba (Edizioni Charta, 2006) p. 50

I've always been interested in the intermingling of different eras: there's our era, but also the geological era and the astronomical era. There are three in all.

Anselm Kiefer, 'With History Under His Skin', in Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba (Edizioni Charta, 2006) p. 49

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who, if he's a painter, has only eyes, if he's a musician has only ears, if he's a poet has a lyre in each chamber of his heart, or even, if he's a boxer, just muscles? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart-rending, stirring or pleasant events of the world, taking his own complexion from them. How would it be possible to disassociate yourself from other men; by virtue of what ivory nonchalance should you distance yourself from the life which they so abundantly bring before you? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy.

Pablo Picasso, 'Statement to Simone Téry' in Art In Theory, 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) p. 649

EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences first-hand – learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER. Self-determination and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom); in the structuring of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of economics (socialism). Self-administration and decentralization (three-fold structures) occurs: FREE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.

Joseph Beuys, 'I Am Searching for Field Character' in Art In Theory, 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) pp. 929-930

It is only with a real and long enough awakening that a person becomes present to himself, and it is only with this presence that a person begins to live like a human being. To know oneself is to know the world, and it is also paradoxically a form of exile from the world. I know that it is this presence of myself, this self-knowledge which causes me to dialogue with the world around me by making art.

Ana Mendieta, 'Art and Politics' in Art In Theory, 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) pp. 1064-1065

All we can do is keep on working, seeking not the acclaim of an invisible posterity, but the qualities of the materials under our own hands.

Carl André, 'On Sculpture and Consecutive Matters' in 12 Dialogues 1962-1963 (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980) p. 18

The city gives the illusion that earth does not exist.

Robert Smithson, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 82

The earth's surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other – one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I will call "abstract geology". One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way. This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries. This slow flowage makes one conscious of the turbidity of thinking. Slump, debris slides, avalanches all take place within the cracking limits of the brain. The entire body is pulled into the cerebral sediment, where particles and fragments make themselves known as solid consciousness. A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched.

Robert Smithson, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 82

Förnyelse? Man bör då minnas, att enligt konsumismens lagar innebär förnyelse enbart en förnyad anpassning till gällande samhällsstruktur. Konsumism och populärkultur var ursprungligen inte nödvändigtvis samma sak. Men har blivit det, helt postmodernt. Därför att konsumismen, lössläppt och nu sanktionerad som svensk överideologi – och ständigt ekande i kulturministerns ord – förgiftar allt den tränger in i. Alltså också populär- och genrekulturen. Det är skillnad mellan att befinna sig på en marknadsplats, och att ses, och att se sig som enbart uttryck för marknadskrafter. Marknadsplatsen erbjuder trots allt många möjligheter, och levande, gnistrande, rykande gränsöverskridanden mellan fin- och populärkultur, skuggor att tillfälligt dra sig tillbaka till, tidsbegränsade allianser, provisoriska möjligheter; marknadskrafterna däremot jämnar ut allt detta till en trist homogen hegemoni. Den vi nu är på väg in i.

Carl Erland Andersson, 'Dags att återvinna det autentiska' in GP, Nr 15, Årgång 153 (Göteborgs-Posten, 2010) pp. 50-51

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.

Robert Smithson, 'A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 56

The mirror promises so much and gives so little, it is a pool of swarming ideas or neoplatonic archetypes and repulsive to the realist. It is a vain trap, an abyss, nevertheless the cold distant people of the Ultramoderne installed themselves in many versions of the Hall of Mirrors. They lived in interiors of gloss and glass, in luminous skyscrapers, in rooms of rarefied atmospheres and airless delights. The overuse of the mirror turned buildings, no matter how solid and immobile, into emblems of nothingness. building exteriors were massive and windows were often surrounded by tomb-like mouldings and casements, but the interior mirrors multiplied and divided 'reality' into perplexing, impenetrable, uninhabitable regions. The walls outdoors were ultra physical, while the walls indoors were ingraspable and vain. The purist is vain enough to imagine he is pure, but this ultimate viewpoint frightens the naturalist. The 'window' and the 'mirror' are secret sharers of the same elements. The window contains nothing, while the mirror contains everything. Consider them both, and you will find it impossible to escape their double identity.

Robert Smithson, 'Ultramoderne' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 50

As for time, female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations. On the one hand, there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance. On the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence, there is the massive presence of a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word "temporality" hardly fits: All-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space, this temporality reminds one of Kronos in Hesiod's mythology, the incestuous son whose massive presence covered all of Gea in order to separate her form Ouranos, the father.

Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 16-17

It could indeed be demonstrated that World War II, though fought in the name of national values, brought an end to the nation as reality: it was turned into a mere illusion which, from that point forward, would be preserved only for ideological or strictly political purposes, its social and philosophical coherence having collapsed. [...] Let us say that the chimera of economic homogeneity gave way to interdependence (when not submission to the economic superpowers), while historical tradition and linguistic unity were recast as a broader and deeper determinant: what might be called a symbolic denominator, defined as the cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography. [...] A new social ensemble superior to the nation has thus been constituted, within which the nation, far from losing its own traits, rediscovers and accentuates them in a strange temporality, in a kind of "future perfect", where the most deeply repressed past gives a distinctive character to a logical and sociological distribution of the most modern type. For this memory or symbolic common denominator concerns the response that human groupings, united in space and time, have given not to the problems of the production of material goods (i.e., the domain of the economy and of the human relationships it implies, politics, etc.) but, rather, to those of reproduction, survival of the species, life and death, the body, sex, and symbol. If it is true, for example, that Europe is representative of such a sociocultural ensemble, it seems to me that its existence is based more on this "symbolic denominator", which its art, philosophy, and religions manifest, than on its specific economic profile, which is certainly interwoven with collective memory but whose traits change rather rapidly under pressure from its partners.

Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 13-14

At the turn of the century a group of colorful French artists banded together in order to get the jump on the bourgeois notion of progress. This bohemian brand of progress gradually developed into what is sometimes called the avant-garde. Both these notions of duration are no longer absolute modes of "time" for artists. The avant-garde, like progress, is based on an ideological consciousness of time. Time as ideology has produced many uncertain "art histories" with the help of mass-media. Art histories may be measured in time by books (years), by magazines (months), by newspapers (weeks and days), by radio and TV (days and hours). And at the gallery proper – instants! Time is brought to a condition that breaks down into "abstract-objects". The isolated time of the avant-garde has produced its own unavailable history or entropy.

Robert Smithson, 'Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space' in The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York University Press, 1979) p. 35

Most notions of time (Progress, Evolution, Avantgarde) are put in terms of biology. Analogies are drawn between organic biology and technology; the nervous system is extended into electronics, and the muscular system is extended into mechanics. The workings of biology and technology belong not in the domain of art, but to the "useful" time of organic (active) duration, which is unconscious and mortal. Art mirrors the "actuality" [...]. What is actual is apart from the continuous "actions" between birth and death. [...] Whenever "action" does persist, it is unavailable or useless. In art, action is always becoming inertia, but this inertia has no ground to settle on except the mind, which is as empty as actual time.

Robert Smithson, 'Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space' in The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York University Press, 1979) p. 32