Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines

Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by lagnuage – language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 187

We are all robbers

For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, to rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 120

What is urbanism?

What is urbanism? A superstructure of neocapitalist society, a form of "organizational capitalism," which is not the same as "organized capital" – in other words, a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. Urbanism organizes a sector that appears to be free and accessible, open to rational activity: inhabited space. It controls the consumption of space and the habitat. As superstructure, it must be distinguished from practice, from social relationships, from society itself. [...] It is only from an ideological and institutional point of view, however, that urbanism reveals to critical analysis the illusions that it harbors and that foster its implementation. In this light, urbanism appears as the vehicle for a limited and tendentious rationality in which space, deceptively neutral and apolitical, constitutes an object (objective).

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) pp. 163-164

Optimism's tenacity

Optimism has one thing in its favor – its tenacity.

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) p. 146

Build and dwell

The human being cannot build and dwell, that is to say, possess a dwelling in which he lives, without also possessing something more (or less) than himself: his relation to the possible and the imaginary.

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) p. 82

Horizons of expectations

We will not reclaim a future qualitatively different form the present by reinvesting in the idea of horizon. At its best, contemporary art models experimental practices of negation that puncture horizons of expectations.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 211

History is inherently utopian

History is about the future in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is only from the standpoint of a particular future that the ultimate object of history – the unity of the human – can be thought. In this respect, history (like art) is inherently utopian. This is something that ties art to history. It is beyond the scope of all actually existing social subjects.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 194

Art creates demand

'It has always been one of the primary tasks of art', Benjamin argued, 'to create a demand whose hour of satisfaction has not yet come.' It is as demand that art functions politically. Boredom intensifies the demand.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 184

Profound boredom

Profound boredom is the feeling of time in its ability to expand itself.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 183

Art and distraction

But if what art must distract its viewers from – in order to function critically as art – is not just the cares and worries of the world, but, increasingly, distraction (entertainment) itself, how to distract from distraction without simply reproducing it? How is art to be received in distraction without becoming just another distraction? Alternatively, how is art to distract from distraction without losing touch with distraction, without entering another realm altogether? – 'contemplative immersion' in the work – with no relation to other distractions, and thereby becoming the vehicle of a flight from actuality, from the very temporal structure of experience which it must engage with if it is to be 'contemporary' and affective?

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 178

the stasis of a present moment

If modernity projects a present of permanent transition, forever reaching beyond itself, the contemporary fixes or enfolds such transitoriness within the duration of a conjuncture, or at its most extreme, the stasis of a present moment.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 24

Con-temporaneity

What seems distinctive and important about the changing temporal quality of the historical present over the last few decades is best expressed through the distinctive conceptual grammar of con-temporaneity, a coming together not simply 'in' time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together 'in time' with our contemporaries – as if time itself is indifferent to this existing together – but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally 'present' temporalities or 'times', a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times.'

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 17

Abstraction's modus operandi is devastation

Abstraction passes for an 'absence' – as distinct from the concrete 'presence' of objects, of things. Nothing could be more false. For abstraction's modus operandi is devastation, destruction (even if such destruction may sometimes herald creation). Signs have something lethal about them – not by virtue of 'latent' or so-called unconscious forces, but, on the contrary, by virtue of the forced introduction of abstraction into nature. The violence involved does not stem from some force intervening aside fro rationality, outside or beyond it. Rather, it manifests itself from the moment any action introduces the rational into the real, from the outside, by means of tools which strike, slice and cut – and keep doing so until the purpose of their aggression is achieved. For space is also instrumental – indeed it is the most general of tools. The space of the countryside, as contemplated by the walker in search of the natural, was the outcome of a first violation of nature. The violence of abstraction unfolds in parallel with what we call 'history'.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991) p. 289

Stanza of the self-imposed siege

In the Middle Ages it was fear to allot allotments inside fortified walls for growing food during assaults.

Today new forces attempted to siege the city — but from within.

Today it is the time of sustainable gardens to reincarnate the new spectres of siege — and the ‘moral equivalent’ of war.

The pacified horizon of sustainability manifests like a wartime without war, the hostility of a silent Ghost Army.

The patriotic war for surplus has indeed moved its home front to the inner front.

The patriotic war is now the war on surplus: on the individual calculation of energy, water, proteins, and any social appetite.

As there is no longer an outside, within the ideology of degrowth we have established the borders of our own siege.

Urban cannibals — eat the rich!

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 12

Stanza of the ternary dance

Life is a ternary movement far from equilibrium.
‘We parasite each other and live among parasites’.

We inhabit the perennial genesis: — natura naturans, the never-ending chain of organisms devouring one other right down to the invisible ones:

‘The fruit spoils, the milk sours, the wine turns into vinegar, the vegetables rot... Everything ferments, everything rots, everything changes’.

Microorganisms take our dead body back to the soil — putrefaction is still life.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 6