The supremacy of space over time

With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space. It is recorded solely on measuring-instruments, on clocks, that are as isolated and functionally specialized as this time itself. Lived time loses its form and its social interest — with the exception, that is, of time spent working. Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as threatening and dangerous (to power). The primacy of the economic and above all of the political implies the supremacy of space over time.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991) pp. 95-96

Any rule is tyranny

If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. 'The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.' We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 295-296

Fulfilment is a function of time

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
[...]
Fulfilment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety-seeking of the spectator, the thrill-hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 275-276

Time has two aspects

Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years; and so on, one can count the orbits endlessly – an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time – it constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or non-cyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tony time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
[...]
Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore... If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chonosophy should provide a field in which relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 185-186

It is only in consciousness that we experience time

It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself form the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 184

To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar

Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilised countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only to pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonour, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable ”windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The way to see how beautiful life is

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance – interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon – I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say O lovely! I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 158

The artist shares

But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behaviour we're capable of. It's certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, buy the nature of any art, it's a sharing. The artist shares, it's the essence of his act.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 146

In the rites of the moneychangers

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 109

The past becomes the future

As surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forego the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 76

Home is a place where you have never been

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 48

Reasoning without desiring is not reasoning

Reason and cognition cannot develop or exercise their functions normally if they are not supported by affects. Reasoning without desiring is not reasoning. In order to think, to want, to know, things must have a consistency, a weight, a value, otherwise emotional indifference annuls the relief, erases differences in perspective, levels everything.

Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident (Polity Press, 2012) p. 22

Language may be regarded as an old city

If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 174-175 

Time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia

In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 142-143

Outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them

Somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed form the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 23-24 

Därför måste det gamla bort

Och det är en människas största lycka att få bygga opp vad hon själv behöver och visa vad hon duger till, och därför måste det gamla bort. Och så tyckte jag mig förstå varför Vår Herre låter riken falla och städer krossas och människoverk bortsopas som löv för vinden. Det får lov att vara så, för att människorna alltid ska ha något att bygga opp och få visa vad de förmår.

Selma Lagerlöf, Jerusalem (III) (Åhlen & Åkerlunds Förlag, 1935), p. 249

A civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments

We can take the original meaning of the word—in late Latin, civilisatio—as a workable starting point; it means “having or establishing settled communities.” A people known to the Romans was civilized if its members lived in civitates, cities or towns. We can generalize this further, and say that a civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments.

John Michael Greer, 'The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part One: Civilization and Barbarism' on The Archdruid Report, URL: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2015/07/the-cimmerian-hypothesis-part-one.html (15/07/2015)

Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes

The delusion of control—the conviction, apparently immune to correction by mere facts, that the world is a machine incapable of doing anything but the things we want it to do—pervades contemporary life in the world’s industrial societies. People in those societies spend so much more time dealing with machines than they do interacting with other people and other living things without a machine interface getting in the way, that it’s no wonder that this delusion is so widespread. As long as it retains its grip, though, we can expect the industrial world, and especially its privileged classes, to stumble onward from one preventable disaster to another. That’s the inner secret of the delusion of control, after all: those who insist on seeing the world in mechanical terms end up behaving mechanically themselves. Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes, and lurch robotically onward along a trajectory that leads straight to the scrapheap of the future.

John Michael Greer, 'The Delusion of Control' on The Archdruid Report (URL: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2015/06/the-delusion-of-control.html, 24/06/2015)

There is necessarily a plurality of interpretations

It is possible, for example, to interpret 'history' as the history of class struggle, or of the struggle of races for supremacy, or as the history of religious ideas, or as the history of the struggle between the 'open' and the 'closed' society, or as the history of scientific and industrial progress. All these are more or less interesting points of view, and as such perfectly unobjectionable. But historicists do not present them as such; they do not see that there is necessarily a plurality of interpretations which are fundamentally on the same level of both suggestiveness and arbitrariness (even though some of them may be distinguished by their fertility – a point of some importance). Instead, they present them as doctrines or theories, asserting that 'all history is the history of class struggle', etc. And if they actually find that their point of view is fertile, and that many facts can be ordered and interpreted in this light, then they mistake this for a confirmation, or even for a proof, of their doctrine.

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 140

A change in the conditions of change

The poverty of historicism, we might say, is a poverty of imagination. The historicist continuously upbraids those who cannot imagine a change in their little worlds; yet it seems that the historicist is himself deficient in imagination, for he cannot imagine a change in the conditions of change.

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 120

The central mistake of historicism

This, we may say, is the central mistake of historicism. Its 'laws of development' turn out to be absolute trends; trends which, like laws, do not depend on initial conditions, and which carry us irresistibly in a certain direction into the future. They are the basis of unconditional prophecies, as opposed to conditional scientific predictions.

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 118

I can see only one emergency following upon another

Men have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. [...] I can see only one emergency following upon another [...], only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations.

H. A. L. Fisher, quoted in Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 100

We manufacture realities

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the colour of our notions about what we do know: if we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread that we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

But that's how all of life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but also a table.We sit down at the table, not at the pinetree. Although love is a sexual instinct, we do not love with that instinct, rather we presuppose the existence of another feeling, and that presupposition is, effectively, another feeling.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 53

Civilization is an education of nature

Only people who wear clothes find the naked body beautiful. The overriding value of modesty for sensuality is that it acts as a brake on energy. Artificiality is a way of enjoying naturalness. What I enjoyed about these vast fields I enjoyed because I don't live here. Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom. Civilization is an education of nature. The artificial provides an approach to the natural. What we must never do, however, is mistake the artificial for the natural. In the harmony between the natural and the artificial lies the essence of the superior human soul.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 52

To live is to be other

To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday's lost life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 48

Nostalgia!

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 6

Love leaves a memory of its weight

Is even the end of us an account? No, don't answer, I know that even the memory has weight. Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds, and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even hezvier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (Faber and Faber, 1974) p. 182

There is politics because man separates himself from his own bare life

There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1998) p. 8

The force of an idea lies primarily in its ability to be displaced

The force of an idea lies primarily in its ability to be displaced.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 152

The scope and manner of the mind's attention are social facts

The disequilibrium of the boat [...] is only a dialectical response, a fun-house mirror reflection of an initial disfiguration or mutilation inflicted under capitalism: the closure of fields of socially available perception, the reduction not only of the environment of freedom but also of the very desire for and memory of that environment. Familiarity with capitalist culture persuades us that this limitation – the specific way people, their bodies, and their physical perceptions are organized within capitalism – is not historical but natural and physical. Yet the scope and manner of the mind's attention, or of the body's capacity for sensation, are social facts – and it is precisely the blindness and dullness peculiar to social relation in market society that enable us to deny the social and allow it to be subsumed in the biological.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 120

Détournement has no other place but the place of the other

Détournement has no other place but the place of the other; it plays on imposed terrain and its tactics are determined by the absence of a "proper place".

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 42

Emancipation must be based on a principle other than work

Emancipation – the transformation of a servile identity into a free identity – must be based on a principle other than work, since the exercise and defense of work are what constitute the servile identity. Emancipation follows from dispensing with the positivities of workers' community, and from radicalizing that atomization instead.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 20

Artists are terrible people

Artists in my experience are not willing to wait for revolutionary change in order to express their sensuous beings and so are disloyal to communities of politics. Debord was right to expel them. They're terrible people.

Roman Vasseur, No Room To Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City (Mute Books, 2010) p. 123

The state of exception

Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (The University of Chicago Press, 2005) p. 87

The purity of a being is never unconditional or absolute

It is a mistake to postulate anywhere a purity that exists in itself and needs only to be preserved.... The purity of a being is never unconditional or absolute; it is always subject to a condition. This condition varies according to the being whose purity is at issue; but this condition never inheres in the being itself. In other words: the purity of every (finite) being is not dependent on itself... For nature, human language is the condition of its purity that stands outside of it.

Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. 206

We think not the distant, but the close that measures it

We believe that we think the strange and the foreign, but in reality we never think anything but the familiar; we think not the distant, but the close that measures it. And so again, when we speak of impossibility, it is possibility alone that, providing it with a reference, already sarcastically brings impossibility under its rule.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 44

All speech is violence

All speech is violence, a violence all the more formidable for being secret and the secret center of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it – a sign, as we have seen, that death speaks (the death that is power) when I speak. At the same time, we well know that when we are having words we are not fighting. Language is the undertaking through which violence agrees not to be open, but secret, agrees to forgo spending itself in a brutal action in order to reserve itself for a more powerful mastery, henceforth no longer affirming itself, but nonetheless at the heart of all affirmation.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 42

True hope is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is

Hope is to be reinvented. Would this mean that what this hope aims at is to be obtained through invention, a beautiful utopian future, or through the splendor of the imaginary that certain romantics are said to have had as their horizon? Not at all. The hope that passes by way of the ideal – the lofty heavens of the idea, the beauty of names, the abstract salvation of the concept – is a weak hope. Hope is true hope insofar as it aspires to give us, in the future of a promise, what is. What is is presence. But hope is only hope. There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immediate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come; hope says the hoped-for coming of what exists as yet only in hope. The more distant or difficult the object of hope is, the more profound and close to its destiny as hope is the hope that affirms it: I hope little when what I hope for is almost at hand. Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost. Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself of all manifest hope. But at the same time we must not hope, as in a dream, for a chimerical fiction. It is against this that the new hope appoints itself. Hoping not for the probable, which cannot be the measure of what there is to be hoped for, and hoping not for the fiction of the unreal, true hope – the unhoped for of all hope – is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) pp. 40-41

Speaking is not seeing

– Words are suspended; this suspension is a very delicate oscillation, a trembling that never leaves them still.
– And yet, they are also immobile.
– Yes, of an immobility that moves more than anything moving. Disorientation is at work in speech through a passion for wandering that has no bounds. Thus it happens that, in speaking, we depart from all direction and all path, as though we had crossed the line.
– But speech has its own way, it provides a path. We are not led astray in it, or at most only in relation to the regularly traveled routes.
– Even more than that perhaps: it is as though we were turned away from the visible, without being turned back round toward the invisible. I don't know whether what I am saying here says anything. But nevertheless it is simple. Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence. I'll let you count all the words through which it is suggested that, to speak truly, one must think according to the measure of the eye.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 27

Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away

Speech is this turning. Speech is the place of dispersion, disarranging and disarranging itself, dispersing and dispersing itself beyond all measure. For the speech that sets into flight, preserves in this very flight the movement of stealing away that is not content with desperate or even panic flight, and thus retains the power of stealing away from it.
[...]
Naturally, when this speech becomes petrified in a watchword, "flight" simply ends and everything returns to order. But flight can also, even while maintaining itself as an infinite power of dispersal, recapture in itself this more essential movement of stealing and turning away that originates in speech as detour. This detour is equally irreducible to affirmation and to negation, to question and to response; it precedes all these modes, speaking before them and as though in turning away from all speech. Even if it tends to determine itself as a power to say no, particularly in the movements that manifest themselves in revolt, this no that challenges all constituted power also challenges the power to say no, designating it as what is not founded in a power, as irreducible to any power and, by virtue of this, unfounded. Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away – it watches over it, preserves it, loses itself there and confirms itself there. In this we sense why the essential speech of detour, the "poetry" in the turn of writing, is also a speech wherein time turns, saying time as a turning, the turning that sometimes turns in a visible manner into revolution.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 23

Contradiction does not represent a decisive separation

Two opposites, beacuse they are simply opposed, are still too close to one another – contradiction does not represent a decisive separation: two enemies are already bound in a relation of unity, while the difference between the "unknown" and the familiar is infinite. Therefore, in the dialectical form, the moment of synthesis and reconciliation always ends by predominating.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) p. 8

My body is a thing that reveals other things

My body is a thing that reveals other things, and can do so only because it is of the same fabric as they. My flesh is where the lines of direction of the world are inscribed on a fold in their midst. The movements of the eye and hand that are not desultory, are movements where – like the red that precipitates because the red of bishop’s robes, gypsies’ dresses, flags of linemen and of the revolution, lips of lovers haunts it – each phase of the movement recalls and refers to the eyes and hands that folded over or will fold over those robes, dresses, flags, lips. Its tissue, like that of the structured layout of a world, is made of these cross-references.

Alphonso Lingis, 'Bodies That Touch Us' in Thesis Eleven no 36 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993) p. 163

The difference is in the touching

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) pp. 200-201

Do your own bit of saving

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) p. 112

The pores in the face of life

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But once he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) pp. 108-109

The world comes into existence as a world of language

Language has an infinite potency, but the exercise of language happens in finite conditions of history and existence. Thanks to the establishment of a limit, the world comes into existence as a world of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics are based on the institution of a limit. But infinity remains unmeasurable.

Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 158

Insurrection is a refrain

Insurrection is a refrain helping to withdraw the psychic energies of society from the standardized rhythm of compulsory competition-consumerism, and helping to create an autonomous collective sphere. Poetry is the language of the movement as it tries do deploy a new refrain.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 151

Poetry is language's excess

In order to accelerate the circulation of value, meaning is reduced to information, and techno-linguistic devices act as the communicative matrix. The matrix takes the place of the mother in the process of generating language.

But language and information do not overlap, and language cannot be resolved in exchangeability. In Ferdinand de Saussure's parlance, we may say that the infinity of the parole exceeds the recombinant logic of the langue, such that language can escape the matrix and reinvent a social sphere of singular vibrations intermingling and projecting a new space for sharing, producing, and living.

Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity.

Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 147

The right to the city is an empty siginifier

This poses a problem: to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists (if it ever truly did). Furthermore, the right to the city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning. The financiers and developers can claim it, and have every right to do so. But then so can the homeless and the sans-papiers. We inevitably have to confront the question of whose rights are being identified, while recognizing, as Marx puts it in Capital, that "between equal rights force decides." The definition of the right is itself an object of struggle, and that struggle has to proceed concomitantly with the struggle to materialize it.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2013) p. xv

The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them

Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden 'it should be otherwise'. When a work of art is merely itself and no other thing, as in a pure pseudo-scientific construction, it becomes bad art – literally pre-artistic. The form of true volition, however, is mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose crystallization becomes an analogy of that other condition which should be. As eminently constructed and produced objects, works of art, including literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life. This mediation is not a compromise between commitment and autonomy, nor a sort of mixture of advanced formal elements with an intellectual content inspired by genuinely or supposedly progressive politics. The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them; if anything, it is the opposite.

Theodor Adorno, 'Commitment' in Utopias (ed. by Richard Noble) (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2009) p. 48

The future is over

Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy and the cult of male aggressivity. But energy is fading in the postmodern world, for many reasons that are easy to detect.

Energy is fading because of the demographic trend: mankind is growing old, as a whole, because of the prolongation of life expectancy, and because of the decreasing birth rate. A sense of exhaustion results from this process of general aging, and what has been considered a blessing – the prolonged life expectancy – may prove to be a misfortune, if the myth of energy is not restrained and replaced with a myth of solidarity and great compassion. Energy is also fading because basic physical resources like oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic reduction. Finally, energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impetus and male aggressivity – on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing.

This is why the future is over, and we are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we are able to come to terms with this postfuturistic condition, we'll renounce accumulation and growth, and will be happy in sharing the wealth from our past of industrial labor and from our present of collective intelligence.

If we are not able to do this, we will be doomed to a century of violence, misery, and war.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) pp. 81-82

Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift

The prospect open to us is not a revolution. The concept of revolution no longer corresponds to anything, because it entails an exaggerated notion of political will over the complexity of contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centered on product growth, profit, and accumulation, but on the full unfolding of the power of collective intelligence.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 64

Reality is not mathematical

The faith in the financial balance which is imposed on the European population is based on a philosophical misunderstanding: the promoters of financial stability think that the social body and mathematics belong to the same sphere. They are wrong, as reality is not mathematical, and mathematics is not the law of reality, but a language whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 33

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt. Deixis acts against the reduction of language to indexicalization and abstract individuation, and the voice acts against the recombinant desensualization of language.
Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order of exchangeability: the road of excess, says William Blake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdom is the space of singularity, bodily signification, the creation of sensuous meaning.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 22

The past buries the past

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed.

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (Book Club Associates, 1978) p. 500

Escaping nihilism

The great challenge, in fact, will be escaping nihilism. Nihilism is no revelation, it's just "Viva la muerte!" I believe that there's a hope beyond hope – Saint Paul's phrase – in finitude, in the magnitude of poverty. I believe there is something of the unknown, a terra incognita in the logic of poverty.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 224-225

The field of freedom shrinks with speed

Speed allows for progress in space, only progress in space has been identified with progress in time, in history. And that is really an abuse of language. We know very well that progress in space is not necessarily progress in time. The fact of going faster from Paris to New York doesn't make the exchanges any better. It makes them shorter. But the shortest is not necessarily the best. There again it's the same illusory ideology that when the world is reduced to nothing and we have everything at hand, we'll be infinitely happy. I believe just the opposite – and this has already been proven – that we'll be infinitely unhappy because we will have lost the very place of freedom, which is expanse. All current technologies reduce expanse to nothing. They produce shorter and shorter distances – a shrinking fabric. Now, a territory without temporality is not a territory, but only the illusion of a territory. It is urgent that we become aware of the political repercussions of such a handling of space-time, for they are fearsome. The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close. A labyrinth for laboratory animals.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 82-83

No more illusions about technology

No more illusions about technology. We do not control what we produce. Knowing how to do it doesn't mean we know what we are doing. Let's try to be a little more modest, and let's try to understand the riddle of what we produce. Inventions, the creations of scientists are riddles which expand the field of the unknown, so to speak. And there we have an inversion. This inversion is not pessimistic per se, it's an inversion of principle. We no longer start from a positivistic or negativistic idea, we start from a relativistic idea. The problem is the following: technology is a riddle, so let's work on the riddle and stop working only on technology.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 76-77

As if the end of history were the end of duration

History as the extensiveness of time – of time that lasts, is portioned out, organized, developed – is disappearing in favor of the instant, as if the end of history were the end of duration in favor of instantaneousness, and of course, of ubiquity.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 60

Death is an interruption of knowledge

Death is an interruption of knowledge. All interruptions are. And it's because there is an interruption of knowledge that a time proper to it is constituted. The rhythm of the alternation of consciousness and unconsciousness is "picnolepsy", the picnoleptic interruption (from the Greek picnos, "frequent"), which helps us exist in a duration which is our own, of which we are conscious. All interruptions structure this consciousness and idealize it.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 47-48

The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks

In classic Aristotelian philosophy, substance is necessary and the accident is relative and contingent. At the moment, there's an inversion: the accident is becoming necessary and substance relative and contingent. Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress – a vision à la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe. The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes. The invention of the airplane was the invention of the plane crash. I believe that from now on, if we wish to continue with technology (and I don't think there will be a neolithic regression), we must think about both the substance and the accident – substance being both the object and its accident.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 46

Duration is the proper of man

Transpolitics is the beginning of the disappearance of politics in the dwindling of the last commodity: duration. Democracy, consultation, the basis of politics, requires time. Duration is the proper of man; he is inscribed within it.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 42

Politics is first and foremost the polis

Urbanist and politician, etymologically speaking, are the same thing. Involvement in a political ideology has obscured the fact that politics is first and foremost the polis.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 17

A Luddism of the human machinery

There is a whole Luddism to be invented, a Luddism of
the human machinery
that feeds Capital.

Tiqqun, 'How To?' on http://www.tiqqun.info/ (15/03/15)

Freeing spaces frees us a hundred times more than any "freed space"

Politics of the whatever singularity.
Becoming whatever is more revolutionary than any whatever-being.
Freeing spaces frees us a hundred times more than any "freed space".
More than putting any power into action, I enjoy the circulation of my potentialities.
The politics of the whatever singularity lies in the offensive. In the circumstances, the moments and the places where we seize
the circumstances, the moments and the places
of such an anonymity,
of a momentary halt in a state of simplicity,
the opportunity to extract from all our forms the pure adequacy to the presence,
the opportunity, at last, to be
here.

Tiqqun, 'How To?' on http://www.tiqqun.info/ (15/03/15)

A subject uses names to make hypotheses about himself

A subject is that which uses names to make hypotheses about truth. But as he is himself a finite configuration of the generic procedure from which a truth results, one can equally sustain that a subject uses names to make hypotheses about himself, "himself" meaning the infinite of which he is the finite.

Alain Badiou, 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Topoi 7 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) p. 98

Making a hole in knowledge

An irrevocable step forward has been made through the critique of earlier concepts of the subject, which is thoroughly based on the notion that truth is not a qualification of knowledge nor an intuition of the intelligible. One must come to conceive of truth as making a hole in knowledge.

Alain Badiou, 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Topoi 7 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) p.94

The time for civilisation is past

We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God's steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records – this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing – for art – to meet. This is what we are here for.

Paul Kingsnorth & Dougald Hine, 'Uncivilisation – The Dark Mountain Manifesto' on The Dark Mountain Project, http://dark-mountain.net/ (15/03/2015)

Life does not consist of choices

"You say that if you had to choose between being a professor at a university and being a farm labourer, you would choose to be a professor. But life does not consist of choices. That is where you keep going wrong. Pablo did not start out as some disincarnate soul given a choice between being king of Spain and being the village idiot. He came to earth, and when he opened his human eyes and looked around, behold, he was in San Juan Obispo, and he was the lowest of the low. Life as a set of problems to be solved; life as a set of choices to be made: what a bizarre way of seeing things!"

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) pp. 24-25

Invisibility isn't a quality of the object

"There are no invisible objects of perception," she replies. "Invisibility isn't a quality of the object. It is a quality, a capacity, an incapacity, of the observer. I call the soul invisible if I can't see it. That says something about me. It says nothing about the soul."

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) p.10

When we speak of time

When we speak of time in the everyday sense, what we are referring to is a remarkable interplay of stability and change. In time, the objects of sense do not seem motionless and fixed, but are displayed as encrusted with shifting features. Nonetheless, experience does not decay in each instant into an untethered kaleidoscope of discontinuous sensations; instead, there seem to be sensual objects of greater or lesser durability. Time is the name for this tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities. When we speak instead of space, everyone will recall the old quarrel between Leibniz and Clarke over whether space is an absolute container or simply a matter of relations between things. But in fact it is neither: for space is not just the site of relation, but rather of relation and non-relation. Sitting at the moment in Cairo, I am not entirely without relation to the Japanese city of Osaka, since in principle I could travel there on any given day. But this relation can never be total, since I do not currently touch the city, and even when I travel to stand in the exact center of Osaka I will not exhaust its reality. Whatever sensual profile the city displays to me, even if from close range, this profile will differ from the real Osaka that forever withdraws into the shadows of being. This interplay of relation and non-relation is precisely what we mean when we speak of space, and in this respect Heidegger's tool-analysis is actually about space, not about time as he wrongly contends. Space is the tension between concealed real objects and the sensual qualities associated with them.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) p. 100

The thing as portrayed by the natural sciences

If we weigh and measure a thing, describe its physical properties, or note its objective position in space-time, these qualities hold good for the thing only insofar as it relates to us or to something else. In short, the thing as portrayed by the natural sciences is the thing made dependent on our knowledge, and not in its untamed, subterranean reality.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) pp. 53-54

Something sandy or stony in the human soul

All relations are on exactly the same footing. This does not entail a projection of human properties onto the non-human world, but rather the reverse: what it says is that the crude prehensions made by minerals and dirt are no less relations than are the sophisticated mental activity of humans. Instead of placing souls into sand and stones we find something sandy or stony in the human soul.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) p. 46

The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth

There's a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it, which produces the madness of so many in our era. In reality, everything involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 97

The logic of insurrection

To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of insurrection. It is once again to hear the slight but always present trembling of terror in the voices of our leaders. Because governing has never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will string you up, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the population.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 96

An entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 91

Outrun its own collapse

The world would not be moving so fast if it didn't have to constantly outrun its own collapse.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 60

Urban space is the means of confrontation

Urban space is more than just the theater of confrontation, it is also the means. This echoes the advice of Blanqui who recommended (in this case for the party of insurrection) that the future insurgents of Paris take over the houses on the barricaded streets to protect their positions, that they should bore holes in the walls to allow passage between houses, break down the ground floor stairwells and poke holes in the ceilings to defend themselves against potential attackers, rip out the doors and use them to barricade the windows, and turn each floor into a gun turret.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 58

To cover the planet with glass

The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city and country. It is the crossroads where all the petty bourgeois come together, in the middle of this middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much a result of rural flight as of urban sprawl. To cover the planet with glass would fit perfectly the cynicism of contemporary architecture.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 54

Living flesh weaving the flesh of the world

They want to make our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we are creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world. Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn't mean knowing how to adapt  – or if that is a kind of intelligence, it's the intelligence of slaves.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) pp. 33-34

The freedom to uproot oneself

The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can't rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 32

Crisis is a means of governing

Crisis is a means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 14

Doomed by hope

"Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds – in a lean season they cut down on their eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever."
"As a species we're doomed by hope, then?"
"You could call it hope. That, or desperation."
"But we're doomed without hope, as well," said Jimmy.
"Only as individuals," said Crake cheerfully.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Virago Press, 2004) p. 139

The measure of the truth

The problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

The right to say nothing

Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 

Construction for no reason at all

Architecture is thus an act—a delirious and amazing act—of construction for no reason at all in the literal sense that architecture is outside rational calculation. That is, architecture—capital-A architecture, sure—must be seen, in this context, as something more than just supplying housing or emergency shelter; architecture becomes a nearly astronomical gesture, in the sense that architecture literally augments the planetary surface. Architecture increases (or decreases) a planet's base habitability. It adds something new to—or, rather, it complexifies—the mass and volume of the universe. It even adds time: B is separated from C by nothing, until you add a series of obstacles, lengthening the distance between them. That series of obstacles—that elongated and previously non-existent sequence of space-time—is architecture.

Geoff Manaugh, 'Lebbeus Woods: 1940-2012' on BLDG BLOG, http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/lebbeus-woods-1940-2012.html (30/10/2012)

The political question

To me politics means one thing: How do you change your situation? What is the mechanism by which you change your life? That’s politics. That’s the political question. It’s about negotiation, or it’s about revolution, or it’s about terrorism, or it’s about careful step-by-step planning – all of this is political in nature. It’s about how people, when they get together, agree to change their situation.

Lebbeus Woods in 'Without Walls: An Interview With Lebbeus Woods' at BLDG BLOG, http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/without-walls-interview-with-lebbeus.html (03/10/2007)

No artist is pleased

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Martha Graham, Martha: The Life And Work Of Martha Graham A Biography (1991) p.264