"True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams." Gaston Bachelard "If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point." Mark Rothko Almost everything in this culture that purports to be a sign of compassion or respect or care, is in every instance an expression of the exact opposite. Politically correct terms or labels, programs from the state claiming to assist the poor, reforms designed to protect consumers, etc. Humanitarian interventions, or the war on poverty. This trickles down, as both cause and effect, to the individual and his vocabulary. On an individual level people have begun to speak … [Read more...]

"Violence so permeates society that popular pleasures are organized around an 'aesthetics of vulgarity', with the state staging public rituals in which 'the masses join the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology', and when power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence." Achille Mbembe (quoted by Randy Martin in Empire of Indifference) "Women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were, they'd be all over me.” Elliot Rodger "(fascism is) the sum total of all the irrational reactions of the natural human character." Wilhelm Reich "What needs to be … [Read more...]

"...the era of neoliberal revanchism was characterized by a discourse of revenge against minorities, the working class, feminists, enviromental activists, gays and lesbians, and recent immigrants: the political enemies of the bourgeois political elite and their supporters." Tom Slater (on Neil Smith) "...this triple exclusion, the prison and the criminal justice system more broadly contribute to the ongoing reconstruction of the ‘imagined community’ of Americans around the polar opposition between praiseworthy ‘working families’—implicitly white, suburban, and deserving—and the despicable ‘underclass’ of criminals, loafers, and leeches, a two-headed antisocial hydra personified by the … [Read more...]

"The neat division between roles and real selves reduces society to a masquerade party. Yet not even plastic surgery can heal the psychic disfigurements. The social evil reaches into the living fibers; people not only assume roles, they are roles." Russell Jacoby "Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning." Ludwig Wittgenstein "The problem of limits (of langauge, of technique) is precisely what interests Tarfuri and seperates him from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Lyotard. For Tarfuri, as well as for Georg Simmel, the limit, the confine, the border (and, as such, form and history), is the place of contradiction - the place, that is, where the thing itself, and, at … [Read more...]

". . . the difference between native peoples and Western peoples [is that] there are still people who know about what came before, and who know that there's still wild nature available and that they have a relationship to it. Among the native cultures of the world there's still a memory and a philosophical base for resistance. As to why some people don't resist and are done in by it, I'd say it results from a complex of factors. Politically, they're overpowered. Technology overpowers them . . . We're uprooted, alienated Westerners feeling vindicated by the fact that now the Indians are also going for it. We look at them and say, "They're going for the snowmobiles and they're dropping the … [Read more...]

"The meaning of this parable is not easy to define. But one thing is clear: this type of parable is not to be thought outside the theatre, or rather outside a certain kind of theatre. In narrative prose Edgar could, of course, lead the blind Gloucester to the cliffs of Dover, let him jump down from a stone and make him believe that he was jumping from the top of a cliff. But he might just as well lead him a day's journey away from the castle and make him jump from a stone or any heap of sand. In film and prose there is only the choice between a real stone lying in the sand and an equally real jump from the top of a chalk cliff into the sea. One cannot transpose Gloucester's suicide attempt … [Read more...]

"Not seeking out a resemblance - the formula is definitive - does not mean distrusting all semblance but rather achieving a resemblance that does not resemble." Zong Bing (375-473 AD), on painting. (Francoise Jullian, Jane Marie Todd tr.) "Consensus consists, then, in the reduction of politics to the police." Jacques Ranciere "The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society." Russell Jacoby Theatre is about space. It is also about history, in the sense of both memory and historical learning. But it is a ritual … [Read more...]

"It is the lack of the experience of the imagery of real art, partly substituted and parodied by by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of the cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven's own people, into Hitler's own people." Adorno "(the knocking makes us aware) that the reaction has commenced, the human has made its reflex upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them." Thomas DeQuincey 'On the Knocking of the Gate in … [Read more...]