Yet it all seems limitless

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Bernardo Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky (Warner Bros. 1997)

Fanaticism and serenity

Somehow, then, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Each one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there is no great art and no profound happiness – and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism, and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed. Perfection of form or increase of knowledge, pursuit of fame or service to the community, love of God or god of Love, – we must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 93

Romantic love, the supreme intoxication

For romantic love, the supreme intoxication of which we are capable, is more than an intensifying of life; it is a defiance of it; it belongs to those evasions of reality through excessive stimulus which Spinoza called 'titivations'.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 89

The deep leaden keel of unhappiness

Now that I seem to have attained a temporary calm, I understand how valuable unhappiness can be; melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers, but we venture out in weather that would sink them, and we choose our direction. What distinguishes true civilisations from their mass-fabricated substitutes except that tap-root to the Unconscious, the sense of original sin?

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 86

Money talks

Money talks through the rich as alcohol swaggers in the drunken, and calls softly to itself to unite into the lava flow which petrifies everything it touches.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 79

Hate is the consequence of fear

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas, or of the type of person whom one has once loved and whose face is preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 77

Termitaries of the future

My rôle is not to belong to the future but, like Eliot's poet, "to live in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past". I believe that a conscious affinity with Nature forms the shield of Perseus through which man can affront the Gorgon of his fate and that, in the termitaries of the future where humanity cements itself up from the light of the sun, this dragon-slaying mirror will rust and tarnish.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 76

Cowardice in living

Cowardice in living: without health and courage we cannot face the present or the germ of the future in the present, and we take refuge in evasion. Evasion through comfort, through society, through acquisitiveness, through the book-bed-bath defence system, above all through the past, the flight to the romantic womb of history, into primitive myth-making.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 75

Truth is a river

Yet ridiculous as may seem the dualities in conflict at any given time, it does not follow that dualism is in itself a worthless process. Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 73

The ultimate meaning

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 259

The end of the world in the world

"The book I'm looking for," says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, "is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 243

For the love of the trick

Something must always remain that eludes us... for power to have an object on which to be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 240

Written truth

But if an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth. The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. The book of my desires? Those also are true only when their impulse acts independently of my conscious will. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 181

Beginnings

But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest – for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both – must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 153

Art is memory

Art is memory: memory is re-enacted desire.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 66

Card-indexes

Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 63

The reward of art

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to live without it.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 54

Dungeon of self

Living in the present (the only escape) has to be contrived by drugs, by injections of work or pleasure, or by the giving 'which plays you least false'. The past is a festering wound; the present the compress vainly applied, painfully torn off. [...] We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 52

The world of Relation

Physical or intellectual attraction between two people is a constant communication. Underneath the rational and voluntary world is the involuntary, impulsive, integrated world, the world of Relation in which everything is one; where sympathy and antipathy are engrossed in their selective tug-of-war.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 49

Reading

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 72

Perfection vs disintegration

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 57

The artist's solitude

A great artist is like a fig-tree whose roots run a hundred feet underground, in search of tee-leaves, cinders and old boots. Art which is directly produced for the Community can never have the same withdrawn quality as that which is made out of the artist's solitude. For this possesses the integrity and bleak exhileration that are to be gained only form the absence of an audience and from communion with the primal sources of unconscious life. One cannot serve both beauty and power.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 42

Write in water and cast in sand

Today an artist must expect to write in water and to cast in sand.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 41

The desire to evolve

Ennui is the condition of not fulfilling our potentialities; remorse of not having fulfilled them; anxiety of not being able to fulfill them, – but what are they?
Let us take a simple idea like the desire to improve, to become better. Is it a natural instinct, or is it the result of early conditioning? Crocodiles, king-crabs, eagles, no not evolve, and yet seem perfectly content with their humble status. And many human beings enjoy a quiet existence without feeling themselves obliged to expand or develop. With the desire to evolve goes the fear of not evolving, or guilt. If there were no parents to make us try to be good, no schoolmasters to persuade us to learn, no one who wished to be proud of us, should not we be happy? [...] Does nature care in the least whether we evolve or not? Her instincts are for the gratification of hunger and sex, the destruction of rivals and the protection of offspring. What monster first slipped in the idea of progress? Who destroyed our static conception of happiness with these growing-pains?

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 40

The combustion of the Present with the Past

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market of Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: that is civilization, and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of combining with the Past. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places, and we need only a few bombs and some prisons to blot it out altogether.
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have not forgiven them. One by one, the Golden Apples of the West are shaken from the tree.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 36

Freedom from Angst

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable. Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine; yet day-dreaming brings guilt; there is no happiness except through freedom from Angst, and only creative work, communion with nature and helping others are Angst-free.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 28

Shattered time and literature

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 8

The benign indifference of the world

For the first time in a very long time I thought of mother. I felt that I understood why at the end of her life she'd taken a 'fiancé' and why she'd pretended to start again. There at the home, where lives faded away, there too the evenings were a kind of melancholy truce. So close to death, mother must have felt liberated and ready to live her life again. No one, no one at all had any right to cry over her. And I too felt ready to live my life again. As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I'd been happy, and that I was still happy.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 117

Enough memories not to get bored

I ended up not being bored at all as soon as I learnt how to remember things. Sometimes I'd start thinking about my room and, in my imagination, I'd set off from one corner and walk round making a mental note of everything I saw on the way. At first it didn't take very long. But every time I did it, it took a bit longer. Because I'd remember every piece of furniture, and on every piece of furniture, every object and, on every object, every detail, every mark, crack or chip, and then even the colour or the grain of the wood. At the same time, I'd try not to lose track of my inventory, to enumerate everything. So that, by the end of a few weeks, I could spend hours doing nothing but listing the things in my room. And the more I thought about it the more things I dug out of memory that I hadn't noticed before or that I'd forgotten about. I realized then that a man who'd only lived for a day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He'd have enough memories not to get bored. In a way, that was a good thing.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 77

An oceanic feeling

I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This 'oceanic feeling' has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this.

Arthur Koestler's suicide note, 1983

A solitary bee

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning. I know that in such contemplation lies my true personality, and yet I live in an age when on all sides I am told exactly the opposite and asked to believe that the social and cooperative activity of humanity is the one way through which life can be developed. Am I an exception, a herd-outcast? There are also solitary bees, and it is not claimed that they are biologically inferior. A planet of contemplators, each sunning himself before his doorstep like the mason-wasp; no one would help another, and no one would need help!

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 19

Obstacles to wisdom

Three faults, which are always found together and which infect every activity: laziness, vanity, cowardice. If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom. Yet it is only the thinking which begins when habit-thinking leaves off, which is ignited by the logic of the train of thought, that is worth pursuing. A comfortable person can seldom follow up an original idea any further than a London pigeon can fly.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 15

First love

We love only once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving: we may appear to ourselves to be as much in love at other times – so does a day in early September, though it is six hours shorter, seems as hot as one in June. And on how that first true love-affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 8

Fountain of consideration

In my religion there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry and doubt. Life would be sacred, because it is all we have, and death, our common denominator, the fountain of consideration.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 6

What I believe

When I consider what I believe, which I can do only by proceeding from what I do not believe, I seem in a minority of one, –and yet I know there are thousands like me: Liberals without a belief in progress, Democrats who despise their fellow-men, Pagans who still live by Christian morals, Intellectuals who cannot find the intellect sufficient, –unsatisfied Materialists, we are as common as clay.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 5

Grace notes

The world is beset by volatility; objects that suggest something akin to an honest response to life help frame the questions that animate the culture. Life is also composed of grace notes, and when those notes become art, they lift our spirits through the modesty of their rendering. The materials used by many of today's artists are redeemed from the rubbish heap and are Franciscan in their simplicity. Extravagant gestures have given way to a handshake or a hug (maybe even a shrug). The best of the work defies a simple knee-jerk response because it tends to be conversational, it wants to slow the passerby down for a chat.

Richard Flood, 'Not about Mel Gibson' in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (Phaidon, 2007) p. 12

Baby Cakes Wisdom

Sex, life, death... I guess it all just happens. The only screwed up stuff is thinking about it afterwards.

Baby Cakes, Baby Cakes Diary #6, http://youtu.be/Ey8yqmYj8TA (10/10/13)

Diverging equity

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in relationship of diverging eqity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses (Picador, 2010) pp. 289-290

The might have been

In history there are no control groups. There is noone to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us.

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses (Picador, 2010) p. 245

Between the wish and the thing

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses (Picador, 2010) p. 244

Permanent orättvisa

Vi har vant oss vid en standard.
Vi betraktar den som vår rättighet.
Den är inte bara ett hån mot världen idag.
Den kommer alltid vara det.
Vi måste vara ensamma om den. För all framtid.
Vi har skapat en livsform som gör orättvisan permanent och ofrånkomlig.

Är slutsatsen klar?
Vi måste bli fattiga igen.
Eller med våld upprätthålla våra privilegier.
Ännu har inget folk, än mindre världsdel, valt frivillig fattigdom.
Det finns inga utsikter att vi kommer att göra det.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p.174

Inlåst i konsten

Delta inte! Vägra! Det var mina imperativ. Jag vägrade erkänna den samtidighet i nu och liv som vi alla är underkastade. Jag ville nå fram till den samtidighet i konst som är oberoende av dagen. Jag låste in mig. Och därinne byggde jag den katapult som skulle slunga mig ut i världen.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p.153

Bordet, trät

Här står bordet.
Flammorna i furun. Som eld, som insjöns vatten.
Ytans årsränder: de mörka vintrarna och de ljusa somrarna.
Hela Sverige. Hela mitt forna jag.
Det var detta jag ville: rent trä.
En yta som fortsätter inåt.
Ett material som lever i döden.
Ett hopp att sanning kan förenas med glädje.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p.135

Idyllens paradox

Idyll måste vara sinnets tillfredsställelse – utan att strävan dock upphör.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p.84

Idyllens rörelseproblem

Det finns en definitiv gräns för den mängd kulturstoff som en människa kan tillägna sig på ett aktivt, funktionellt sätt. [...] Och vad skulle behövas utöver detta? Vilken rörelse i vilken riktning skulle vara att föredra framför en fullständig rörelsefrihet inom den hittillsvarande mänskliga traditionen?
Den är tillräcklig.
Men vart tar människan vägen? Idyllens rörelseproblem innebär en paradox som kan formuleras så här. Meningsfull rörelse innebär att man är på väg någonstans. Idyllen, så som Schiller definierar den, avser att gestalta ett fulländningstillstånd. Vart skulle en människa i detta tillstånd bege sig? [...] Ett tillstånd utan meningsfull rörelse blir ett slags död. Det kan inte uppfattas som fulländat.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) pp. 85-86

Ogräs till aska

Han odlar både en trädgård och ett universum. Han sitter vid sin mila som alkemisten vid sin degel, som glaspärlespelaren vid sina tecken, och bränner ogräsets mångfald till askans enhet.
Livets ogräs till konstens aska.
Levande ogräs till död aska.
Vissnat ogräs till bördig aska.
Alla spelets möjligheter finns med i hans arbete vid elden. Arbetet en metafor. Men en utförbar metafor. En konst som blivit handling.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p. 81

Lidelsen att uppfostra världen

Men också lidelsen att förbättra andra och uppfostra världen måste man bli herre över.  Så är tillvaron beskaffad att ädla andars lust att göra historia liksom alla andra drifter slutar i blod och våld.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p. 76

Capitalism as a sacrifice-movement

Kapitalismen är ingen religion, utan upplösningen av all religion i en jordisk, självständiggjord offerrörelse: kapitalfetischen.

Robert Kurz, Gelde Ohne Wert, quoted (and translated) on Copyriot http://copyriot.se/2013/08/15/geld-ohne-wert-lasanteckningar-del-20-om-sammanbrottets-horisont/ (03/09/2013)

The Untimely

The task of modern philosophy is to overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal. Following Nietzsche we discover, as more profound than time and eternity, the untimely: philosophy is neither a philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the eternal, but untimely, always and only untimely – that is to say, "acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come".

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. xix

Poetry is a waste of time

On the planet of happy eunuchs and zombies, poetry is a waste of time.

Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink (Picador, 2011) p. 101

Permutera historien

Själv vågar jag ännu inte tro på någonting, kanske är det förklaringen till att jag måste släppa allt och bara arbeta med detta. Kopiera, permutera, multiplicera – som en övning i produktivt användande av det förflutna och historien, ett användande som inte stannar vid representation eller åminnelse, utan även blir en återtillägnelse, en framtid. En åkallan? Att upprepa, kopiera, variera. Komplicera, permutera, multiplicera. Då spricker det monolitiska, då grumlas det klara. Då förvandlas historien, synbarligen lika oföränderlig som själva verkligheten, till något ofärdigt: det som nyss verkade vara fullbordat och klart öppnas därmed upp för en ny begynnelse, en fortsättning.

Andrezej Tichý, Kairos (Albert Bonniers, 2013)

History is now

The best part of history, Goethe said, is that it inspires. This is a maxim by which all creative people have lived and worked, including those who become creative because they have no choice. Willful destruction obviates the burdening weight of history, leaving only the liberating elixir of its inspiration. History is now. The accumulated remnants of the past are important elements in culture, and in the individual's existence, but exist only to be transformed into the material of the present. Willful destruction is an attack on history that at the same time drives its survivors to react by elevating history to a near-religious importance. Whenever this happens, history becomes pernicious, infecting the present with the odor of the dead.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 29

Progress, quantity and quality

Progress becomes quantitative and tends to delay indefinitely the turn from quantity to quality – that is, the emergence of new modes of existence with new modes of reason and freedom.

Herbert Marcuse, quoted in Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 22

Cartesian logic

The most intractable problem in applying radically inventive architectural thinking comes not so much from the invincibility of the prevailing system of reasoning as from an intrinsic flaw in that system's structure. Cartesian logic posits the existence of fundamental dualities that can never, by its own rules, be entirely rationalized, just as the orthogonal frame can never be completely stabilized. Thus, presumed opposites remain unreconciled. So it is with the "man versus nature" paradigm. From this follows the belief that it is rational to tame or defeat nature – including "human nature," the source of all uncivilized, unsocialized behavior – by insisting on applying an abstract spatial system even when it has been proven inadequate in coping with particular conditions.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 21

The poetic and the paradox

Only through aesthetic evocations of the paradoxical – in other words, through the poetic – can such contraries as war and peace, construction and destruction, suffering and pleasure be resolved without a loss of creative tension. In this sense, if in no other, Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that "the word can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon." And it is true for societies at least as much as for individuals. This is what is meant finally by the term "culture," the highest pinnacle of which is invariably occupied in any society by conscious manifestations of the poetic.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 22

Broken buildings

Wherever buildings are broken by the explosion of bombs or artillery shells, by lack of maintenance or repair, by fire or structural collapse, their form must be respected in its integrity, embodying a history that must not be denied. In their damaged state they suggest new forms of thought and comprehension, and new conceptions of space that confirm the potential of the human to integrate with the building, to be whole and free outside of any pre-determined, totalizing system. The new spaces of habitation constructed on the existential remnants of war and natural disaster do not celebrate the destruction of an established order, nor do they symbolize or commemorate it. Rather they accept with pride what has been suffered and lost, but also what has been gained. They build upon the shattered form of the old order a new category of order inherent only in present conditions, within which existence feels its strengths, acknowledges its vulnerabilities and failures, and faces up to the need to invent itself as though for the first time, thus seizing the means to continuously refresh and revitalize itself. There is an ethical and moral commitment in such an existence, and therefore a basis for community.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) pp. 15-16

Modernist architecture

Modernist architecture, just as the positivism that formed its foundations, was as single layered and hierarchical as the damaged cultural tissue it claimed to erase. Modernist architecture was too classical in its knowledge, too tied to cause-and-effect conceptions of process, too slavish in its worship of the machine (and its deterministic processes) to embody the chaotic spirit of the new age. Architecture, tied then and now to hierarchies of authority of both the left and the right, to modernist and postmodernist doctrines, has missed out on the revolution in knowledge that occurred in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and that continues today.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 15

Words and doing

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear.

[...] I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) pp. 160, 162

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) p. 38

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) p. 34

I'd say we all have a dead child within us. We don't die once, we have already died several times over.

Christian Boltanski & Tamar Garb, 'Interview' in Christian Boltanski (Phaedon, 1997)

Boltanski: Well, I'd say that there are very few subjects in art, and these are looking for God, asking questions about death and love and sex. I'm working around the idea of vanitas, a huge subject in art. You are somebody, but if I kill you, you will become an awful body in a bloody sheet, an object. I find that idea very strange and unclear and it's a question I often think about. I also think that our relationship with death and dying these days is not good at all. Fifty years ago one's grandfather, say, would die at home, and the grandchild would see the grandfather's dead face. The fact of dying was inside the fact of living. Now we've become ashamed of dying, we want to forget that we're going to die. Dying has become an accident. But I think it's important to speak about it as it's the only thing we can really be sure of. We are all going to die. We also have a problem with the fact of killing. For example, I eat meat but I would never dream of killing an animal. But I think if we eat meat, we have to accept that being alive means that we kill things around us. But we forget these basic aspects of our humanity.

Garb: But there's a difference between speaking about death as one of the grand themes of life, and confronting one's own death. Is making art about death yet another defence against the question of your own mortality?

Boltanski: I'm sure of it. When I told you at the beginning of the interview that I was 'dead' already, it was to do with avoiding death. If you are already dead then you don't have to die.

Christian Boltanski & Tamar Garb, 'Interview' in Christian Boltanski (Phaedon, 1997)

We can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumour invariably lacks.

Walter Benjamin, 'Max Brod's Book on Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 142

To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.

Franz Kafka, quoted in Walter Benjamin 'Franz Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 126

It is a desire to stand in the ritual unfolding of the world that inspires me to build, rather than only wander and see, for to build is to participate more fully in the great cycles of natural change. In building, I do not propose a return to nature, much less a return to primitivism, but an alignment of modern technology, including that of architecture, with cycles of change and the great powers both active and latent in the world.

Lebbeus Woods, Origins (Architectural Association, 1985) p. 42

In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of the languages themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. Though concealed and fragmentary, it is an active force in life as the symbolized thing itself, whereas it inhabits linguistic creations only in symbolized form. While that ultimate essence, pure language, in the various tongues is tied only to linguistic elements and their changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted with a heavy, alien meaning. To relieve it of this, to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation. In this pure language – which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant by all languages – all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 80

The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality. But it cannot be a matter of extending its dominion under the feeble sceptre of the soul, as Fechner tried to do, or, conversely, of basing its definition on the even less conclusive factors of animality, such as sensation, which characterize life only occasionally. The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher's task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 72

In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a certain public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an 'ideal' receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 70

There’s always the possibility of an architectural hangover, something we regret that we built. That’s entropy — the impossibility of getting a site back to the state it was. One could be nostalgic, but I think of all these layers as one great, expanded archaeological site. There’s no nostalgia in my work. It’s always about now.

Cyprien Gaillard, 'Beautiful Ruins' in T Magazine, http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/beautiful-ruins/ (20/05/2013)

All that matters is to hoist one's sails and make for the open sea, avoiding like the plague all those who persuade themselves that they have found what they sought, who cease to move forward, but build their little shelters and compose themselves to slumber.

François Mauriac, Thérèse (Penguin Books, 1959) p. 59

När nutida betraktare blickar bakåt och ser varumarknader och penningväsen, fast i enklare form, då är detta bara ett exempel på hur framstegstänkandet är en fetisch. Mynten under antiken var inte en “enklare” form än dagens pengar, utan de var någonting helt annat, minst lika komplext.

Rasmus Fleischer, 'Geld ohne Wert: läsanteckningar del 3' at Copyriot, http://copyriot.se/2013/04/14/geld-ohne-wert-lasanteckningar-del-3/ (14/04/2013)

Det som gör hoppet till en så intensiv lustförnimmelse är att framtiden, som vi efter eget gottfinnande förfogar över, samtidigt uppenbarar sig för oss i en mångfald lika leende och lika möjliga former (une multitude de formes). Även om den starkast åtrådda av dessa förverkligas, måste vi ge upp de övriga och mister därmed mycket. Vår föreställning om framtiden, rik på oändliga möjligheter, är alltså mer fruktbar än framtiden själv. Härav kommer det sig att man finner mera tjusning i hoppet än besittningen, i drömmen än i verkligheten.

Henri Bergson, 'Tiden och den fria viljan' quoted on Intensifier, http://christopherkullenberg.se/?p=2661 (14/04/2013)

Om du då träffar en man som frågar dig om det är en spade du bär på axeln, då ska du svara ja och börja gräva i jorden med åran. Då finner du kanske lycka, Lyckan kanske är nergrävd just på den platsen. Då kanske du kommer ut ur din ensamhet och till varelser som gräver i marken med enkla spadar efter lyckan och som inte gräver efter Lyckan med svärd eller lans i andra mänskors kroppar. Då kanske du blir en alldeles ny mänska, den allra första av en ny sort.

Eyvind Johnson, Strändernas svall (Albert Bonniers Förlag. 2004) p. 149

Historien säger ingenting annat än att den eller den personen som har gjort den eller den inskriften på den eller den stenen har blivit tillsagd att göra inskriften på befallning av den eller den härskaren – historien säger ingenting annat än att den som har fått befallning att sjunga den eller den hjältedikten eller krigarvisan faktiskt har sjungit så högt att hans efterkommande och lyssnarna och lyssnarnas barn lärde sig sången utantill och förde den vidare!

Eyvind Johnson, Strändernas svall (Albert Bonniers Förlag. 2004) p. 44

Han visste, att om man vill komma ihåg någonting så ska man gå baklänges in i minnesdjungeln, minnesmoraset med små, små steg och då kommer men ju tillbaka in i det och står där. Vill man glömma kan man smyga sig bort, smyga sig framåt så försiktigt att inte ens nuet klibbar vid ens kläder, smyga sig in i framtidens verklighet med så lätta steg att minnet inte hör, ja, så att man rent av villar bort minnet.

Eyvind Johnson, Strändernas svall (Albert Bonniers Förlag. 2004) p. 34

Låt mig vara tydlig: arbetssamhälle = kapitalism = tillväxt = modernitet.
Att tänka sig ett uppbrott från detta är en ganska stor sak. Det går bortom allt trams om “nolltillväxt”, vilket mest är ett sätt att bejaka tillväxtens kris – ett nollmål förutsätter ett samhälle där det fortfarande är meningsfullt att mäta “tillväxten”. På samma vis är “postmodernismen” mest ett sätt att bejaka modernitetens kris, utan att avskaffa dess kategorier.

Rasmus Fleischer, 'Till kritiken av arbetskritiken' on Copyriot (08/04/13)

FREEDOM: a state emptied of preconceived value, use, function, meaning; an extreme state of loss within which choice is unavoidable; a condition of maximum potential, realised fully in the present moment.
[...]
KNOWLEDGE: the invention of the world in all the complexity and multiplicity of its phenomena.
ARCHITECTURE: instrument for the invention of knowledge through action; the invention of invention.
[...]
HIERARCHY: a predetermined vertical chain of authority that works from the top down.
HETERARCHY: a spontaneous lateral network of autonomous individuals; a system of authority based on the evolving performances of individuals, eg, a cybernetic circus.
[...]
CONSTRUCTION: the invention of reality.
REALITY: a state necessitating the invention of construction.
OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE: terms of dualism divorcing experience from reality.
[...]
BEAUTY: 'knowledge without interest'; ideas embodied in and transcended by forms.
[...]
MEANING: the free interaction of values.
[...]
RELATIVITY THEORY: the great destroyer of hierarchies; description of the world according to an observer.
[...]
CONSUMERISM: a state of becoming limited by the total entropy of a system.
MASS CULTURE: a system diminishing the autonomy of individuals; a state of undifferentiated nature within which the making of distinctions is difficult.
REVOLUTION: self-cancelling mass political machinations; the necessity of formlessness.
[...]
FORM: the condition of boundaries, perceived as exterior to self.
SPACE: the condition of boundaries, perceived as interior to self.
[...]
STRUGGLE: the essential condition of freedom.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Glossary' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 142

If I could believe in utopia, it would be a utopia of free movement, a perpetual assertion of self-determined existence in space and time. But I cannot believe in utopia, so I believe in movement attained through and limited by struggle, tension, anxiety and the assertion of my personal power against the power of the earth, against gravity and death.

I cannot believe in utopia, because utopia insists on an absolute consensus among people, and such a consensus cancels the individual's power to assert his and her presence in the world. Consensus is an ally of gravity. It is in fact a form of gravity that slowly and insidiously disables individuals and makes them impotent before the relentless claims of gravity and death. I declare war on consensus.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Aerial Paris' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 64

The construction of a new city within and in opposition to an existing one amounts to an act of renunciation and even of violence, more lasting in its effects than those achieved by the gun. One need only compare the changes made to cities by modern warfare and by modern architecture to confirm this idea. The process of changing from one type of order to another is always violent. Over time, architecture can be the most potent weapon of change.

 Lebbeus Woods, 'Underground Berlin' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 50

Self-preserving cultures seek static equilibrium, the maintenance of a status quo, as the founding principle of social coherence. The means of this maintenance is conformity to standards and norms. Contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes are intolerable in such societies, because they are inconsistencies that undermine requisite conventions.

Contemporary society is not self-preserving, but essentially self-transforming. It seeks dynamic equilibrium. Continual change is what it is based on, and what it needs above all else. This extends fully into the realm of knowledge, what it is and what it means today. Knowledge is no longer that inertial body of facts which enforces stasis, but is in fact the impetus to and energy driving change on every level of society and culture.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Heterarchies' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 46

So long as the concept of hierarchy dominates architecture (as it presently does), architecture will stay rooted in classical models, at the urban and building scales alike. So long as architecture stays rooted in classical models (as it presently does), it will continue to express an old, even archaic, idea of knowledge. So long as architecture expresses another idea of knowledge than that which best serves the present conditions of living (as it presently does), architecture will be a regressive force in the world of human affairs, even of human existence itself.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Heterarchies' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 46

architecture resisting change, even as it flows from it, struggling to crystallise and be eternal, even as it is broken and scattered – architecture seeking nobility of presence, yet possessed of the knowledge that only the incomplete can claim nobility in a world of the gratuitous, the packaged, the promoted and the already sold – architecture seeking nobility of persistence in a world of the eternally perishing, itself giving way to the necessity of its moment

Lebbeus Woods, 'Turbulence' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 40

No puzzling, no arguments, just pure experience. Knowing a thing just as it is known. No dualisms or those other tight systems that end in resolution, therefore in spiritual death. Better to know nothing, than to know those as true.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Centricity'' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 27

The architecture of tactility cannot be separated from the architecture of ephemerality, either in concept or in implementation.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 13

One does not participate by following the crisis of change, but by being part of its initiation.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 11

The difference between the hierarchical and the heterarchical city is the difference between being and becoming.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 11

Existential beauty is destroyed by the impulse to possess, to own, to contain, to hold fast, therefore to dominate. Expression is possession. the manifestation of a lust for domination. Any attempt to express in a form an idea external to it is an attempt to arrest the idea in time, to control it beyond its life. I despise all such 'expressionism', and none more than that which appropriates ineffable symbols, archetypes – in fact, types of any kind. These are the most vain and tyrannical attempts to eternalise the ephemeral.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) pp. 10-11

'I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic,' Brotteaux answered. 'Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime.'

Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood (Penguin Books, 1990) p. 80

Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well.

Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood (Penguin Books, 1990) p. 71

Latent i vår vokabulär vilar ett antagande om ägande som den mest fundamentala relationen, om statiska atomära enheter av du och jag istället för ett dynamiskt vi i ständig tillblivelse. Grammatikens kategorier av subjekt och objekt kräver ett förtingligande av det som skall omsättas i ord: endast det som kan objektifieras låter tala om sig. Den grammatiska hanteringen av min kvinna, min mor, min son följer samma princip som den av min bil, min sko, min bok. Objektifiering är en språklig förutsättning.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 19

Tekniken som räddare av liv, och räddare från liv. Mer än något annat är tekniken ett medel för att undkomma den direkta livserfarenheten, att skyla nakenheten som det medför att vara hud mot hud med tillvaron.
Genom teknologin skapas en värld dränerad på mänsklighet, och genom teknologin erbjuds vi en tillflyktsort från detta effektivitetens inferno. Framsteget biter sig självt i svansen: det konstruerar omtänksamma robotar för att fylla frånvaron av den omtänksamma människa som är upptagen i robotkonstruktion.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 116-117

Tekniken infantiliserar människan genom att avlägsna henne från det direkta uppfyllandet av sina mest grundläggande behov, samtidigt som den förser henne med en illusion av allmakt och fullständig autonomi. Den människa som är mest utlämnad till en teknologisk infrastruktur för sin överlevnad är i den kulturella mytologin den sant fria individen. Det är det lilla barnets försvarslösa omnipotens reproducerad och förvrängd i industriell skala, en abstraherad tillit till blodlösa strukturer, ett intellektuellt oberoende skapat genom fullständig fysisk utsatthet. Den tekniska ordningen innebär ständig geografisk-ekonomisk expansion, och ett lika oupphörligt krympande utrymme för den egna mänskligheten. Civilisation har sitt ursprung i det yttres utvidgning och det inres kringskärning.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 114-115

Den moderna myten är en berättelse om framsteg, om mänsklighetens oupphörliga transport mot perfektion. Den linjära tidens obändiga framåtrörelse ekar i pornografins drivande dynamik, i den politiska ideologins idé om enkelriktad förbättring: alltid en strävan mot, aldrig en vila i. Förändring och förbättring utsätts för sammanblandning, ömsesidig omdefinition i termer av varandra.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 109

Genernas programkod lika välordnad, i grunden lika reduktionistiskt enkel, om än i praktiken mer komplex genom sin blotta omfattning. På denna mikroskopiska nivå förstoras vetenskapens begränsning upp till tydlighet: förståelse omdefinieras till kvantifiering, insikt blir till indentifikation. Om vi vet vilka signalsubstanser som produceras i hjärnan då vi älskar, har vi förstått kärlek? Genom att kartlägga det mänskliga genomet, förklarar vi människan? Möjligen, om vi omdefinierar också henne, till hormonproduktion och egenintresse. Den själviska människan, styrd av den själviska genen: kanske är hennes förklaring inget annat än en utdragen sekvens av ATGC.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 100-101

Man drar en magisk cirkel omkring sig, och stänger ute allt som inte passar ihop med ens hemliga lekar. Varje gång livet slår sönder cirkeln blir lekarna små och grå och löjeväckande. Då drar man genast en ny cirkel; bygger nya skydd.

Ingmar Bergman, Såsom i en spegel (SF, 1961)

Laib considers the attempt to create beauty the tragic failure of most art. For him, art is an act of participation and sharing – participating in nature and sharing that experience with others.

Klaus Ottman, 'The Solid and the Fluid: Perceiving Laib' in Wolfgang Laib; A Retrospective (American Federation of Arts, 2000) p. 20

–Not that the phrase is at all to my liking: for to say a man is fallen in love,––or that he is deeply in love,––or up to the ears in love,––and sometimes even over head and ears in it,––carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:––this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,––I hold to be damnable and heretical:––and so much for that.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) p. 450

Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, That the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) p. 369

Inconsistent soul that man is!––languishing under wounds, which he has the power to heal!––his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge!––his reason, that precious gift of God to him––(instead of pouring in oil) serving but to sharpen his sensibilities,––to multiply his pains, and render him more melancholy and uneasy under them!

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) pp. 211-212

To understand what time is aright, without which we never can comprehend infinity, insomuch as one is a portion of the other,––we ought seriously to sit down and consider what idea it is, we have of duration, so as to give a satisfactory account, how we came by it.––What is that to any body? quoth my uncle Toby. For if you will turn your eyes inwards upon your mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you will perceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking and smoaking our pipes: or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist, and so we estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or any thing else commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thing co-existing with our thinking,––and so according to that preconceived––You puzzle me to death, cried my uncle Toby.
––'Tis owing to this, replied my father, that in our computations of time, we are so used to minutes, hours, weeks, and months,–and of clocks (I wish there was not a clock in the kingdom) to measure out their several portions to us, and to those who belong to us,–that 'twill be well, if in time to come, the succession of our ideas be of any use or service to us at all.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) p. 200

Accidents, in the deterministic sense, are not designed, but simply "happen." They are out of control in that their what, where, or when can never be predicted exactly. But they are designed, in the Virilian sense, because the creation of any working system insures their probability, thus their inevitability. In that sense, we had better learn how to live with them, if they are not always to be catastrophic, or to work creatively with them, if anything constructive is to emerge in their aftermath. The first step is to acknowledge that accidents arise spontaneously not from an infinite number of possibilities, but from a limited set of probabilities: a matrix, a trajectory field of unpredictably transforming vectors.

Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) pp. 117-119

Premeditation is the enemy of tension. Predictability is the enemy of seeing. Design as a prescriptive method diminishes the tension between ourselves and the objects of our perception, and thus our ability to see them for ourselves. More critically, it diminishes our capacity to perceive what is there but not seen, exemplified by our perception of space itself.

Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) pp. 59-61

Space, we must acknowledge, is essentially an intellectual construct. We understand it to be there, even if we experience it as a void, an absence that we cannot see. Space is always the implication of objects. For an object to exist, we think, it needs some kind of space. So, the first space we can imagine is the space occupied by objects. In order to see an object we must be separate from it. A space must exist between us and the object. Therefore, we imagine a space around the object, and also around ourselves, because, at some primary stage in our mental development, we realize that we too are objects. Space is the medium of our relationships with the world and everything in it, but, for all of that, we do not yet experience it in a palpable sense. We must think space into existence.

Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) pp. 51-52

In thinking of architecture "at rest," we adopt a position based on stability and predictability. Also, we construct a system of knowledge that privileges these qualities. This underpins our actions and dictates our goals. The unity and symmetry of monumental architecture refers symbolically to a harmonious and balanced universe in which contending forces are reconciled. The traditional role of architecture has been one of reassuring us that things are under our control, that is, stable and static. But it is quite another thing to think of all architecture "in tension."
An architecture in tension suggests a struggling architecture and a humanity with limited control of the forces of nature, and of itself. The forces in such an architecture are activated, not pacified. For the moment, they seem to be held in check, at least to the extent they can be measured. Still they are straining against the materials holding them. Experience teaches that architecture does not create entirely stable or predictable situations. Change is inevitable, as the materials age or tire, or as they are affected by disturbances within or around them. The forces are, in effect, at war with the materials; they want to overcome them; they want to be free of materiality, to flow into the world's vast oceans of energy, from which they will be reborn again and again in continuous cycles of transformation. Such an understanding of architecture conditions our outlook on the world and leads to the construction of a knowledge-system based on concepts of process and transience.

 Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) pp. 45-48

If I cannot free myself from the reassurance of the habitual, how can I speak of the experimental, which is nothing without real risk, even loss? If I cannot free myself from obsession with the end-product, how can I advocate the revelations latent in the processes of making things? Without freedom from the tyranny of the object, how can I attain the measure of independence necessary to join with others, who, in the making of things, conquer their existence in the first place by their own efforts? If I cannot free myself, how can I advocate the freedom of others, in whichever terms they might choose?

Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) p. 37

What can man do more? that is what seemed to me important to know. Os what man has hitherto said all that he could say? Is there nothing in himself he has overlooked? Can he do nothing but repeat himself? ...And every day there grew stronger in me a confused consciousness of untouched treasures somewhere lying covered up, hidden, smothered by culture and decency and morality.

André Gide, The Immoralist (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 137

The dialectical world is a conflictual one, comprised of different forces contending not for dominance so much as position. In the dialectical relationship, each side needs its opposite – that is the prerequisite for conversation. The aim of contention is not to destroy the opposition, but to find parity with it, to "coexist." In the emerging, globally monological world, the aim is quite the opposite, that is, to destroy opposition and dissention, to remove any impediment to the dominance of one. In the new world order, wars are still fought, but they are wars of eradication. The aim is to smooth the way for a single point of view, a single way of living and thinking. Conflict is seen as an almost biological necessity, not a matter of considered choice.
[...] In the emerging monological culture, one deprived of dialectic and dialogue, dissention does not count. You are either with us or against us. You are either in the game, or you are out.

Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) pp. 17-19