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