Frågan om kapitalismens framtid beror på om kapitalismen i obegränsad omfattning kan fortsätta att föregripa framtida värde, eller om detta tvärtom har karaktären av en ändlig resurs. Det hela känns som tautologi eller rekursion: kapitalistisk framtid är en oändlig resurs så länge det finns en förhoppning om en oändlig kapitalism. Här kollapsar subjekt och objekt.

Rasmus Fleischer, 'Krisen, del 75: Ernst Lohoff om det fiktiva kapitalets historia' at Copyriot (http://copyriot.se/ 2012-12-22)

'If only our paltry minds,' he said, 'were able to embalm our memories! But memories keep badly. The most delicate fade and shrivel; the most voluptuous decay; the most delicious are the most dangerous in the end. The things one repents of were at first delicious.'
Again a long silence; and then he went on:
'Regrets, remorse, repentance, are past joys seen from behind. I don't like looking backwards and I leave my past behind me as the bird leaves his shade to fly away. Oh, Michel! every joy is always awaiting us, but it must always be the only one; it insists on finding the bed empty and demands from us a widower's welcome. Oh, Michel! every joy is like the manna of the desert which corrupts from one day to the next; it is like the fountains of Ameles, whose waters, says Plato, could never be kept in any vase... Let every moment carry away with it all that it brought.'

André Gide, The Immoralist (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 107

I depicted artistic culture as welling up in a whole people, like a secretion, which is at first a sign of plethora, of a superabundance of health, but which afterwards stiffens, hardens, forbids the perfect contact of the mind with nature, hides under the persistent appearance of life a diminution of life, turns into an outside sheath, in which the cramped mind languishes and pines, in which at last it dies. Finally, pushing my thought to its logical conclusion, I showed Culture, born of life, as the destroyer of life.

André Gide, The Immoralist (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 90

I believe that happiness wears out in the effort made to recapture it; that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

André Gide, The Immoralist (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 62

Well, surely there is something as irreducible about the material world as there is about subjectivity. Maybe we never fathom either. A piece of earth can seem as incomprehensible as the fact of memory.

Robert Morris, From Mnemosyne to Clio: The Mirror to the Labyrinth (Musée d'Art contemporain, Lyon, 2000) p. 173

I myten dröjer en aning om den gestlika kommunikationen kvar, ett minne av en tid i vilken kommunikationen skedde med våra kroppar som aktiva agenter, inte som passiva kärl. Föreställningen om en sådan kommunikation som primitiv och fattig vittnar snarast om vår egen kulturs sinnliga armod.

Den kultiverade jorden, den kultiverade människan, är den underordnade, välordnade, produktiva. Den som alstrar värden, men som i sig är utan värde.

Nedtoningen av språkets gestlika funktioner är ytterligare ett uttryck för den civiliserade kulturens iscensättning av separation. Språket konstrueras och framhålls som formellt system för att utgöra en unikt mänsklig egenskap, något som skiljer oss från och lyfter oss över vår icke-mänskliga omgivning.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 86-87

En ständigt pågående konstruktion av det primitiva utgör grund för den kulturella fästning som skall skydda oss ifrån oss själva. Det oreglerade, ociviliserade livet, "plågsamt djuriskt och kort"; kulturen som isolering mot den mänskliga, och icke-mänskliga, naturen.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 62

"There aren't any beginnings," Burton said. "Nor any ends. It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can't remember, into a future he can't forsee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates itself."

John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 259

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 244

TAMARUS: But ideas are like money. There must be an accepted coin which circulates. Concepts which are used for communication are justified by success.
ANNANDINE: That's near to saying that a story is true if enough people believe it.
TAMARUS: Of course I don't mean that. If I use an analogy or invent a concept part of what must be tested when the success is tested is whether by this means I can draw attention to real things in the world. Any concept can be misused. Any sentence can state a falsehood. But words themselves don't tell lies. A concept may have limitations but these won't mislead if I expose them in my use of it.
ANNANDINE: Yes, that's the grand style of lying. Put down your best half truth and call it a lie, but let it stand all the same. It will survive when your qualifications have been forgotten, even by yourself.
TAMARUS: But life has to be lived, and to be lived it has to be understood. This process is called civilization. What you say goes against our very nature. We are rational animals in the sense of theory-making animals.
ANNANDINE: When you've been most warmly involved in life, when you've most felt yourself to be a man, has a theory ever helped you? Is it not then that you meet with things themselves naked? Has a theory helped you when you were in doubt about what to do? Are not these very simple moments when theories are shilly-shallying? And don't you realize this very clearly at such moments?
TAMARUS: My answer is twofold. Firstly that I may not reflect upon theories, but I may be expressing one all the same. Secondly that there are theories abroad in the world, political ones for instance, and so we have to deal with them in our thoughts, and that at moments of decision too.
ANNANDINE: If by expressing a theory you mean that someone else could make a theory of what you do, of course that is true and uninteresting. What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.
TAMARUS: That may be. But what about my other point?
ANNANDINE: It is true that theories may often be part of a situation that one has to contend with. But then all sorts of obvious lies and fantasies may be a part of such a situation; and you would say that one must be good at detecting and shunning lies, and not that one must be good at lying.
TAMARUS: So you would cut all speech, except the very simplest out of human life altogether. To do this would be to take away our very means of understanding ourselves and making life endurable.
ANNANDINE: Why should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story – but that doesn't stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence.

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) pp. 80-81

'[...] As soon as I start to describe, I'm done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you...'
'Touch it up?' I suggested.
'It's deeper than that,' said Hugo. 'The language just won't let you present it as it really was.'
'Suppose then,' I said, 'that one were offering the description at the time.'
'But don't you see,' said Hugo, 'that just gives the thing away. One couldn't give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one's heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to try to make an impression – it would be for effect, it would be a lie.'
I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn't see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, 'But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like "Pass the marmalade" or "There's a cat on the roof", turns out to be a sort of lie.'
Hugo pondered this. 'I think it is so,' he said with seriousness.
'In that case one oughtn't to talk,' I said.
'I think perhaps one oughtn't to,' said Hugo, and he was deadly serious. Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end.
'That's colossal!' said Hugo. 'Of course one does talk. But,' and he was grave again, 'one does make far too many concessions to the need to communicate.'
'What do you mean?'
'All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us – and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.'

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) pp. 59-60

'This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence. It's not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was.'
This seemed to me very foolish talk. 'But love is concerned with possession,' I said. 'If you knew anything about unsatisfied love, you'd know this.'
'No,' said Anna strangely. 'Unsatisfied love is concerned with understanding. Only if it is all, all understanding, can it remain love while being unsatisfied.'

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 40

The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a café will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 31 

Människan måste tolkas, det måste inte Gud. Gud är harmoni genom sig själv, människan kan endast nå harmoni genom en kamp (mellan ljus och mörker, samt massa andra dimensioner). För det andra, Gud frammanar Skapelsen, människan är blott ett subjekt som skapar. För det tredje, människan skapar endast territorier (länder, städer, taggtrådsstängsel), inte jorden (Earth, die Welt). Trots allt detta utgör människan “hjälten” i romantiken, som vi ändå måste primärt tänka som tysk. Tyskt territorium, grekiskt jordklot. Denna spänning skapar romantikens imperialism, hanfågeln som markerar sitt revir genom kvitter. Imperiet som kodar toner mot distinktionen territorium – jord. Vår enda väg är “protestantisk” kritik.

 Christopher Kullenberg, 'Barocken och romantiken, mot en teori om den musikaliska fromheten.' at http://christopherkullenberg.se/ (29/10/2012)

Livet som allt överordnad ideologi, livet som idolbild på flickrumsväggen, livet som mekanisk koreografi. Samtidigt den pockande frågan om livets mening, en fråga vars blotta formulering vittnar om en förlorad känsla av meningsfullhet.

Döden drivs undan till periferin, foliepaketeras, kläs i desinficerande terminologi, förträngs.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 60

En likartad motstridighet präglar den civiliserade individens tillvaro: självtillräcklig, fri, autonom och kapabel att fatta sitt livs centrala beslut. Samtidigt oförmögen att på egen hand garantera sin överlevnad, utlämnad till en industriell infrastruktur för fyllandet av sina kroppsliga behov, förväntad att sälja större delen av sin vakna tid till högstbjudande, fråntagen möjligheten att dricka friskt vatten, andas ren luft. Valfriheten som en fullständig frånvaro av frihet.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 59

Kvantmekanikens och tillvarons paradoxer bottnar i en föreställning om möjligheten till betraktande utan interaktion, i en motvilja att lämna en trygg begreppsvärld av egenskaper, partiklar, objektivitet. I själva verket innebär varje mätprocess, varje interaktion, etablerandet av en relation med omvärlden och, tautologiskt, är det om karaktären hos denna relation som teoretisk och experimentell praktik kan producera utsagor: vad vi får reda på då vi utför mätningar på ett system är just hur systemet beter sig då vi utför mätningar på det. Ett erkännande av kontextens betydelse är alltså inte liktydigt med ontologisk relativism: med världen får det vara som det vill; till vår upplevelse av världen är vi ofrånkomligen bundna.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 34

Var i vår omgivning finner vi en modell för den mänskliga organismens komplexitet, för levande varelsers samspel? Vad lär oss att vara människor på samma vis som havet är hav? Mänsklig förändring, mänsklig tillblivelse, söker sin analogi i knoppande träd, lövens fall vid höstningen, dagsmeja över snö, smältande is och frysande vattendrag. I frånvaro av detta ersätts växandet med tillväxt, mallen för formation av mänsklig vuxenhet blir ekonomins cancerartade expansion: ett ego i ständig utvidgning, växande inte genom förening utan genom övertagande. Barnet klarmrar sig fast vid kramdjuret, vid det uppstoppade djuret, vid husdjuret. Där han förväntar sig frändskap och ömsesidighet möter han en slät projektionsyta, en friktionsfri icke-relation att förfoga över efter eget tycke. Spegeln är krossad; mänsklighetens innebörd förblir oklar i ett kugghjulsuniversum av atomiska objekt med funktion som enda essens.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 24-25

Att vistas i en omgivning som är sitt eget syfte är vila.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 23

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the wind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? because of this: – one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the entropy written in our nature?

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Sceptre, 2004) pp. 527-528

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears. Film gives those lost worlds a brief resurrection.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Sceptre, 2004) p. 244

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach it, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Sceptre, 2004) p. 17

Once it's lost, innocence can't be found again. Paradise is a place with many exits, but no entrance. There's no way back from knowledge. When you fall from grace, that's it.

I wonder, to find it again, whether we shouldn't do just the opposite of what we've done. If we shouldn't take another bite out of the apple...

Paul Gégauff/Barbet Schroeder, La Vallée, 1972

'That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing to try for. If we had lost our own chief good, other people's good would remain, and that is worth trying for. Some can be happy. I seemed to see that more clearly than ever, when I was the most wretched. I can hardly think how I could have borne the trouble, if that feeling had not come to me to make strength.'

George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 1994) p. 809

'I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,' said Will, impetuously. 'You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy – when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight – in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.'

George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 1994) pp. 219-220

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Penguin Classics, 2006) p. 99

[Today] it's almost inconceivable that we're going to be able to shake this shitty system off its foundations, to create a new trajectory for ourselves as a species, in relation to nature. But that's the idea of "Cut the World"-- why not try? All we've got is legend to make of ourselves. The legends are being written, whether we try or not. We're either a bunch of assholes who lay around, waiting for the inevitable to happen, while we indulge our every last tidbit of consumerism. Or we try to use the platforms available to us to at least shake things.

Antony Hegarty, 'Director's Cut interview' at Pitchfork.com (2012-09-18)

Labour as aesthetic strategy is an attempt to experience the suffering of others, to demonstrate the impossibility of remaining outside what one critiques, and yet, at the same time, when deploying it in something so 'useless' as this empty artwork, attempting to defeat capitalism.

Mieke Bal, 'Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut' in Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (Tate Publishing, 2007) p. 60

Every built structure (to paraphrase Virilio) is the possibility of a new disaster. To build is thus also to construct infinite lines of destruction.

Eyal Weizman, 'Seismic Archaeology' in Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (Tate Publishing, 2007) p. 33

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. [...] It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) pp. 185-186

The terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it's awareness of knowledge's limits. [...] To acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) p. 163

Perhaps it's that you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) p. 117

Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) p. 23

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Faber and Faber Limited, 2000) p. 116

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don't go on for ever. It must have been shattering – stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Faber and Faber Limited, 2000) p. 63

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Picador, 2007) p. 139

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Picador, 2007) p. 56

Art is short, life is long.

Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans (Penguin Books, 2001) p. 73

Skyscrapers and semi-detached houses alike, roads and railway lines, will be reduced to sand and pebbles, and strewn as glistening and barely recognizable relics along the shoreline of the future.

Jan Zalasiewicz, The Earth After Us (Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 81

He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?
There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis form infancy through maturity to decay.

Why did he desist from speculation?
Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more acceptable phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed.

Did Stephen participate in his dejection?
He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to  the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.

James Joyce, Ulysses (Penguin Books, 1969) p. 618

The arbitrary, self-contained nature of language's symbolic organization creates growing areas of false certainty when; wonder, multiplicity and non-equivalence should prevail.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (C.A.L. Press, 1999) p. 34

In fact, in this reading of Hegel — one affirmed by Marx himself in his own doctrine — the future is already present within the present of time: the present is already immanently the future it "ought" to have. Historical change exists, but it is systemic change; it is the movement between the great Hegelian "shapes" or Gestalten, which foreshadow later structural conceptions of the social totality, of epistemes or even modes of production.

This is not to say that such a notion of totality does not remain ambiguous: for the affirmation of the future already latent in the present can mean on the one hand that the future is already here, but waiting within the present as the statue waits to be disengaged from the sculptors block of marble; or it can simply mean that whatever future is already present in the unsubstantial subjective form of wishes and longings, never to be realized insofar as "the future never comes."

Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (Verso, 2010) p. 72

It is the mind that posits noumena in the sense in which its experience of each phenomenon includes a beyond along with it; in the sense in which the mirror has a tain, or the wall an outside. The noumenon is not something separate from the phenomenon, but part and parcel of its essence; and it is within the mind that realities outside or beyond the mind are "posited." To be sure, the language of the mind and of thinking is too narrow and specialized for this more general structural principle, which is also a dialectical one. The more fundamental question for such a doctrine — or for such a method, for such a perspective, if you prefer – is not whether objective reality exists; but rather from what vantage point the operation of positing is itself observable. Are we not outside the mind in another way when we show how the mind itself posits its own limits and its own beyond?

Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (Verso, 2010) pp. 29-30 

We therefore here arrive at a decisive moment dialectically, in which difference, by gradually extending its dominion over everything, ultimately comes to liquidate identity as such, in a well-nigh suicidal meltdown in which it must itself also disappear (inasmuch as difference is necessarily predicated on identity in the first place).

Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (Verso, 2010) p. 24

Oddly, Aristotle inflects both time and change in the direction of deterioration or passing away: “we regard time in itself as destroying rather than producing,” a standpoint which would seem to neglect growth, physis, emergence. But we have to understand that, for the Greeks, change and movement are inextricably intertwined: even decay is by them figured as a kind of movement, and to that degree no doubt we can assume that change is a subset of the topic of motion as such.

Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2009) p. 479

'If one's wise,' he said at last, 'one doesn't ask whether it makes any sense. One does one's work and leaves the problem of evil to one's metabolism. That makes sense all right.'
'Because it's not oneself,' said Sebastian. 'Not human, but a part of the cosmic order. That's why animals have no metaphysical worries. Being identical with their physiology, they know there's a cosmic order. Whereas human beings identify themselves with money-making, say, or drink, or politics, or literature. None of which has anything to do with the cosmic order. So naturally they find that nothing makes sense.'

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) pp. 298-299

In politics we have so firm a faith in the manifestly unknowable future that we are prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to an opium smoker's dream of Utopia or world dominion or perpetual security. But where natural resources are concerned, we sacrifice a pretty accurately predictable future to present greed. We know, for example, that if we abuse the soil it will lose its fertility; that if we massacre the forests our children will lack timber and see their uplands eroded, their valleys swept by floods. Nevertheless, we continue to abuse the soil and massacre the forests. In a word, we immolate the present to the future in those complex human affairs where foresight is impossible; but in the relatively simple affairs of nature, where we know quite well what is likely to happen, we immolate the future to the present.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 286

True religion concerns itself with the givenness of the timeless. An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity – either past time, in the form of a rigid tradition, or future time, in the form of Progress towards Utopia. And both are Molochs, both demand human sacrifice on an enormous scale. Spanish Catholicism was a typical idolatry of past time. Nationalism, Communism, Fascism, all the social pseudo-religions of the twentieth century, are idolatries of future time.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 285

There isn't any secret formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 275

But there is also the life of the spirit, and the life of the spirit is the analogue, on a higher turn of the spiral, of the animal's life. The progression is from animal eternity into time, into the strictly human world of memory and anticipation; and from time, if one chooses to go on, into the world of spiritual eternity, into the divine Ground. The life of the spirit is life exclusively in the present, never in the past or future; life here, now, not life looked forward to or recollected.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) pp. 269-270

We understand the devilishness of the political manifestations of the lust for power; but have so completely ignored the evils and dangers inherent in the technological manifestations that, in the teeth of the most obvious facts, we continue to teach our children that there is no debit side to applied science, only a continuing and ever-expanding credit. The idea of Progress is based on the belief that one can be overweening with impunity.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 268

Permit me to recall very briefly that a certain deconstructive procedure, at least the one in which I thought I had to engage, consisted from the outset in putting into question the onto-theo-but also archeo-teleological concept of history – in Hegel, Marx, or even in the epochal thinking of Heidegger. Not in order to oppose it with an end of history or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order to show that this onto-theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity. It was then a matter of thinking another historicity – not a new history or still less a "new historicism," but another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems, and insist on it, moreover, as the very indestructibility of the "it is necessary." This is the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) pp. 93-94

This law would signify the following to us: in the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, there where a certain determined concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itself – of promising itself. There where man, a certain determined concept of man, is finished, there the pure humanity of man, of the other man and of man as other begins or has finally the chance of heralding itself – of promising itself. In an apparently inhuman or else a-human fashion. Even if these propositions still call for critical or deconstructive questions, they are not reducible to the vulgate of the capitalist paradise as end of history.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) p. 93

Whatever may be its indetermination, be it that of "it is necessary [that there be] the future", there is some future and some history, there is perhaps even the beginning of historicity for post-historical Man, beyond man and beyond history such as they have been represented up until now. We must insist on this specific point precisely because it points to an essential lack of specificity, an indetermination that remains the ultimate mark of the future: whatever may be the case concerning the modality or the content of this duty, this necessity, this prescription or this injunction, this pledge, this task, also therefore this promise, this necessary promise, this "it is necessary" is necessary, and that is the law.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) pp. 91-92

The present is what passes, the present comes to pass, it lingers in this transitory passage, in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives, at the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself. This in-between articulates conjointly the double articulation according to which the two movements are adjoined. Presence is enjoined, ordered, distributed in the two directions of absence, at the articulation of what is no longer and what is not yet. To join and enjoin. This thinking of the jointure is also a thinking of injunction.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) p. 29-30

How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name of event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) p. 17

Language originates from the mouth. It comes from within, obeying the speed of the body, the dexterity of hand and the formation of the palette. But whereas the voice, the organic form of language, has the power to connect bodies at the site of their juncture with the outside world – ears and mouth – language as an abstract and totalising system enacts a kind of conceptual violence apart from the body. Far from being the primary grid of things, the nominalist fantasy, language is revealed as a historical construct coherent only with the density of its own past.

Neville Wakefield, 'Ann Hamilton: between words and things' in Mneme (Tate Gallery Publications, 1994) p. 25

In normal contexts the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world yet in in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move into that world and allows the world to enter.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985) p. 38

'Inevitable Progress!' he repeated. 'Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are – there we are in the Golden Future. But needless to say, in the very nature of things, the future can't be golden. For the simple reason that nobody ever gets anything for nothing. Massacre always has to be paid for, and its price is a state of things that absolutely guarantees you against achieving the good which the massacre was intended to achieve. And the same is true even of bloodless revolutions. Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards. Backwards and downwards,' he repeated; and, taking the cigar out of his mouth, he threw back his head and gave vent to a long peal if wheezy laughter.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) pp. 128-129

Think about the possibility of the work of art shifting allegiance – embodying rather than representing the cyclical, embracing labor, biology, mortality, change, process; becoming more deeply part of the mutable world rather than a monument on its banks. Reconnect the act of making to its sister acts of laboring, consuming, attending, the acts that make the world, over and over again. Shift from the new to the renewed; recognize the world has no lack of things, only of attending to things; shift then from production to maintenance.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 50

As money is not the measure of money but all else, so humanity is not the measure of itself but something that is measured and measures everything else.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 49

We made a world with permeable walls: the world of made things was a membrane that buffered us while continuing to exchange with the unmade world, a body around the body. As that made world became larger the walls became less penetrable, though there was less and less to shut out. Like the ideal, this world became an imitation of what was absent rather than the symbolic, symbiotic presence in relation to absence, as though inside were a substitute rather than a symbiont of outside. The crucial question about a wall is where it's breached.

So we live in a world that first existed inside the heads of others, a world built up through innumerable sustained acts of intentionality, a world where everything speaks not of nature and her processes but of its makers in their resistance to those processes. In a very real sense we can be described as living inside the heads of others, in an excess of interiority that obliterates our own relation to material origins, to biologies, to our bodies. (This is not to propose there is a state of being outside culture, but that the experiences culture mediates are increasingly of itself alone.) In some way, making was intended to override the givens of nature, to create a world; that world has itself become a given whose terms are more limited in their scope for imagination and act. The world is so thoroughly made it calls for no more making, but for breaching its walls and tracing its processes to their origins. Taking apart has become the primary metaphor and backward the most significant direction: the creative act becomes an unraveling, recouping the old rather than augmenting the new.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 44

Absence is the condition of the imagination.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 44

Symbol, from the Greek symbolon, means a broken piece, one half of which signifies the existence of the other, a presence that indicates what is absent. The incompleteness of the presence, but the incompleteness of the absence: symbionts.

Every object is afloat on the processes that created it and will consume it. It can be read as a symbol of those processes and scrutinized for signs of them. What is present should speak of what is absent. Not only words and pictures tell their stories, things do as well in a language older than imagemaking or speaking. That is, the world itself is a language that speaks to us (thus geologists speak of reading rocks, doctors of reading x-rays). Every thing serves as evidence: the feather of the bird, the bird of birds, birds of the open air. A loaf of bread should speak of reapers, bakers, mills and wheatfields, so that one ingests the world, is nourished by labors and landscapes, not by bread alone. (The supermarket loaf would speak of pesticides and factories, processes that don't correspond to the mythologies and emblems that organize our world.) What complicates the sense of loss is that what is now lost is largely what was absent – what is present has become silent.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 43

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 255

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 254

The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 252

The Western experience of time is split between eternity and continuous linear time . The dividing point through which the two relate is the instant as a discrete, elusive point. Against this conception, which dooms any attempt to master time, there must be opposed one whereby the true site of pleasure, as man's primary dimension, is neither precise, continuous time nor eternity, but history. Contrary to what Hegel stated, is is only as the source and site of happiness that history can have a meaning for man. For history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man's servitude to continuous linear time, but man's liberation from it. [...] Just as the full, discontinuous, finite and complete time of pleasure must be set against the empty, continuous and infinite time of vulgar historicism, so the chronological time of pseudo-history must be opposed by the cairological time of authentic history.

True historical materialism does not pursue an empty mirage of continuous progress along infinte linear time, but is ready at any moment to stop time, because it holds the memory that man's original home is pleasure. It is this time which is experienced in authentic revolutions, which [...] have always been lived as a halting of time and an interruption of chronology. But a revolution from which there springs not a new chronology, but a qualitative alteration of time would have the weightiest consequence and would alone be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration.

Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (Verso, 2007) pp. 114-115

Only process as a whole has meaning, never the precise fleeting now; but since this process is really no more than a simple succesion of now in terms of before and after, and the history of salvation has meanwhile become pure chronology, a semblance of meaning can be saved only by introducing the idea – albeit one lacking any rational foundation – of a continuous, infinite progress.

Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (Verso, 2007) p. 106

But the two times, past and future, how can they be, since the past is no more and the future is not yet? On the other hand, if the present were always present and never flowed away into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity. But if the present is only time, because it flows away into the past, how can we say that it is? For it is, only because it will cease to be.

St. Augustine, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (Verso, 2007) p. 104

We're seeing the crisis of inner nature, the prospect of complete dehumanization, linking up with the crisis of outer nature, which is obviously ecological catastrophe.

John Zerzan, Running On Emptiness (Feral House, 2002) p. 47

The powerlessness of technology remains hidden by people's powerlessness to escape it. Without calling the whole idea of development into question, it seems well-nigh impossible to escape from the totalitarianism of technology.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 79

De-growth, in the sense that it provides the philosophical foundations for a project for an autonomous society, is probably not a humanism because it is based upon a critique of development, growth, progress, technology and, ultimately, modernity and because it implies a break with Western centralism.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 99

A critique of the growth society implies a critique of capitalism, but the converse is not necessarily true. Capitalism, neo-liberal or otherwise, and productivist socialism are both variants on the same project for a growth society based upon the development of the productive forces, which will supposedly facilitate humanity's march in the direction of progress.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 89

The technological and promethean fantasy that we can create an artificial world is a way of rejecting both the world and being.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 35

The emergence of death is then at that point the signal that it has been possible to take the point of view of the species upon human existence. Utopia necessaraily takes the point of view of the species upon human history, thus emptying it of much that we consider not merely historical but irreplaceably significant in human life. For the urgent specificity of historical events is at one with their uniqueness and their contingency: the irrevocable moment when this special possibility had to be grasped or forever lost. History is the most intense experience of this unique fusion of time and the event, temporality and action; history is choice, freedom, and failure all at once, inevitable failure, but not death. Utopia is set at a height form which those changes are no longer visible: even if the Utopia in question is one of absolute change, change is nonetheless viewed from that well-nigh glacial and inhuman standpoint as absolute repetition, as a sameness of change as far as the eye can reach. A state of society that does not need history or historical struggle lies beyond much that is precious to us in individual as well as collective existence; its thought obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 122-123

Modernization, by stripping away the traditional representations with which human temporality was disguised and domesticated, revealed for one long stark moment the rift in existence through which the unjustifiability of the passing of time could not but be glimpsed, by Baudelaire, who called it ennui, the ticking away of the meter still running, the look downward into the meaninglessness of the organic, which does not set you any tasks but only condemns you to go on existing like a plant.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 84-85

I have already suggested that the thinking of totality itself – the urgent feeling of the presence all around us of some overarching that we can at least name – has the palpable benefit of forcing us to conceive of at least the possibility of other alternate systems, something we can now identify as our old friend Utopian thinking. Of the antinomies, perhaps we can conclude a bit more, namely that their ceaseless alternation between Identity and Difference is to be attributed to a blocked mechanism, whereby in our episteme these categories fail to develop, fail to transform themselves by way of their own interaction, as they have seemed able to do in other moments of the past (and not only in the Hegelian dialectic). If so, that blockage can only have something to do with the absence of any sense of an immediate future and of imaginable change: for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or transitional stages.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 70-71

For the ideals of Utopian living involve the imagination in a contradictory project, since they all presumably aim at illustrating and exercizing that much-abused concept of freedom that, virtually by definition and in its very structure, cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified: if you know already what your longed-for exercise in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom after all but only repetition; while the fear of projection, of sullying an open future with our own deformed and repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat to the indulgence of fantasies of the future collectivity.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 56-57

But surely ecology is another matter entirely; and while its rediscovery and reaffirmation of the limits of nature is postmodern to the degree to which it repudiates the modernism of modernization and of the productivist ethos that accompanied an earlier moment of capitalism, it must also equally refuse the implied Prometheanism of any conception of Nature itself, the Other of human history, as somehow humanly constructed. How antifoundationalism can thus coexist with the passionate ecological revival of a sense of Nature is the essential mystery at the heart of what I take to be a fundamental antinomy of the postmodern.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 46-47

So it is that the end of modernism is accompanied not merely by postmodernism but also by a return of the awareness of nature in both senses: ecologically, in the deplorable conditions in which the technological search for profits has left the planet, and humanly, in the disillusionment with people's capacity to change, to act, or to achieve anything substantive in the way of collective praxis.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 50-51

The violence was no doubt always implicit in the very conception of ownership as such when applied to land; it is a peculiarly ambivalent mystery that mortal beings, generations of dying organisms, should have imagined they could somehow own parts of the earth in the first place. [...]

The point is, however, that where the thematic opposition of heterogeneity and homogeneity is invoked, it can only be this brutal process that is the ultimate referent: the effects that result from the power of commerce and then capitalism proper – which is to say, sheer number as such, number now shorn and divested of its own magical heterogeneities and reduced to equivalencies – to seize upon a landscape and flatten it out, reorganize it into a grid of identical parcels, and expose it to the dynamic of a market that now reorganizes space in terms of and identical value. The development of capitalism then distributes that value most unevenly indeed, until at length, in its postmodern moment, sheer speculation, as something like the triumph of spirit over matter, the liberation of value from any of its former concrete or earthly content, now reigns supreme and devastates the very cities and countrysides it created in the process of its own earlier development. But all such later forms of abstract violence and homogeneity derive from the initial parcelization, which translates the money form and the logic of commodity production for a market back onto space itself.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 24-25

The experience and the value of perpetual change thereby comes to govern language and feelings, fully as much as as the buildings and the garments of this particular society, to the point at which even the relative meaning allowed by uneven development (or "nonsynchronous synchronicity") is no longer comprehensible, and the supreme value of the New and of innovation, as both modernism and modernization grasped it, fades away against a steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless.

What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been so standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social, and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogeneously. [...]

What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is that henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer. [...] The persistence of the Same through absolute Difference – the same street with different buildings, the same culture through momentous new sheddings of skin – discredits change, since henceforth the only conceivable radical change would consist in putting an end to change itself.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 17-18

Today, the very meaning of demolition as such has been modified, along with that of building: it has become a generalized postnatural process that calls into question the very concept of change itself and the inherited notion of time that accompanied it.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) p. 12

It is conceivable that our environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a rational, comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only because it is in the long-term interest of the system to solve these problems. But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent. Thus, while practical considerations may eventually force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to environmental problems, equally practical considerations will force the system to regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by indirect means that will disguise the encroachment on freedom.)

Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (Green Anarchist, 1995) p. 33

Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology.

[...] While the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.

Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (Green Anarchist, 1995) p. 32

By “freedom” we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large organization. Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the life-and-death issues of one's existence; food, clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one's environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness.

Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (Green Anarchist, 1995) p. 24

Art is disappearing because the immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the world that must be voided.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 70

The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a leading role denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly prizes novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that reality must be constantly updated.

But avant-garde culture cannot compete with the modern world's capacity to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically). Its demise is another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 69

Language itself is a repression, and along its progress repression gathers – as ideology, as work – so as to generate historical time. Without language all of history would disappear.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 41

To assert that humanity is only human because of language generally neglects the corollary that being human is the precondition of inventing language.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 35

Civilization is often thought of not as a forgetting but as a remembering, wherein language enables accumulated knowledge to be transmitted forward, allowing us to profit from other's experiences as though they were our own. Perhaps what is forgotten is simply that other's experiences are not our own, that the civilizing process is thus a vicarious and inauthentic one. When language, for good reason, is held to be virtually coterminous with life, we are dealing with another way of saying that life has moved progressively farther from directly lived experience.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 35

As the subjects live less, death grows more precipitous, more terrifying.

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (The Seabury Press, 1973) p. 370

This triumph [of time], as noted above, awakened a great spatial urge by way of compensation: circumnavigating the globe and the discovery, suddenly, of vast new lands, for example. But just as certain is its relation to "the progressive disrealization of the world," in the words of Charles Newman, which began at this time. Extension, in the form of domination, obviously accentuated alienation from the world: a totally fitting accompaniment to the dawning of modern history.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 16

Technological society can only be dissolved (and prevented from recycling) by annulling time and history.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 16