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

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

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

Absence is the condition of the imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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