In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary ‘working’ men. They are a race apart—outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men ‘work’, beggars do not ‘work’; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic ‘earns’ his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout—in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?—for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (Penguin Classics, 2001) pp. 185-186

The neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture

The neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers. In many instances the semiotics of so-called 'defensible space' are just about as subtle as a swaggering white cop. Today's upscale, pseudo-public spaces – sumptuary malls, office centers, culture acropolises, and so on – are full of invisible signs warning off the underclass 'Other'. Although architectural critics are usually oblivious to how the built environment contributes to segregation, pariah groups – whether poor Latino families, young Black men, or elderly homeless white females – read the meaning immediately.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Verso, 2006) p. 226

The problem of crowd control

Ultimately the aims of contemporary architecture and the police converge most strikingly around the problem of crowd control. As we have seen, the designers of malls and pseudo-public space attack the crowd by homogenizing it. They set up architectural and semiotic barriers to filter out 'undesirables'. They enclose the mass that remains, directing its circulation with behaviorist ferocity. It is lured by visual stimuli of all kinds, dulled by musak, sometimes even scented by invisible aromatizers. This Skinnerian orchestration, if well conducted, produces a veritable commercial symphony of swarming, consuming monads moving from one cashpoint to another.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Verso, 2006) p. 257

An accidental history and a purely anecdotal historicity

Past, present, future: once more, what remains of the long duration of history or the short durations of the event in the face of the lack of duration involved in instantaneity, if not the beginnings of an accidental history and a purely anecdotal historicity?

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) p. 100

Atemporal futurism is gearing up to swamp the secular shores of general history

Global warming on the one hand, economic overheating on the other: honestly, disaster anticipation is becoming so widespread we'll soon need to set up meteopolitics in place of a geopolitics that is obviously too 'down-to-earth' now that atemporal futurism is gearing up to swamp the secular shores of general history before too long!

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 94-95

Deterrence of the future as well as of the past

In the nineteenth century, Progress meant the Great Commotion of the railways. In the twentieth century, still meant more the Great Speed of the bullet train and the supersonic jet. In the twenty-first century, it means the Instantaneity of the intereactive telecommunications of cybernetics. So the anachronistic acceleration of present reality certainly does not spell the end of historicity. More importantly, it does spell the emergence of lying, not by omission any more, but by deterrence of the future as well as of the past.

This involves a sudden loss of memory, every bit as much as of imagination, about the future of a too-cramped telluric planet, cluttered – and rendered insalubrious – not so much by rubbish these days as by the illusion it entertains, its great progressive illusions.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 70-71

An exurbanism that is not so much metropolitan as omnipolitan

The original town is giving way to the ultracity produced by an exurbanism that is not so much metropolitan as omnipolitan.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 36-37

The futurism of the instant

And so, after the twentieth century's Futurism of long-term History, denounced by Daniel Lévy and celebrated by Marinetti, the time will then have come for this futurism of the instant, which Octavio Paz spoke to us about, observing bitterly: 'The moment is uninhabitable, just like the future.'

It is this form of insalubrious uninhabiting that today speaks to us through the exoduses, through the distant exiles, through all this dislocation of expatriation that is only ever deportation in disguise – not, as in days gone by, propelling people towards the extermination of the camps, towards genocide, any more, but driving them towards externalization, the outsourcing, of the ultracity to come, the genocide of the twilight of places, the exhaustion of the resources produced by the geodiversity of the terrestrial globe.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 23-24

The Metacity will be outsourced to the middle of nowhere

For if the Axis of the World ran through the heart of the city of antiquity long ago, tomorrow's ultracity, the Metacity, will be outsourced to the middle of nowhere!

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) p. 15