"We live in an age in which violence and the logic of disposability mutually reinforce each other. For example, unarmed and with his hands raised, Michael Brown was not only shot by a white policeman, but his body was also left in the street for four hours, a reminder of the same treatment given to the low income inhabitants of Katrina whose bodies, rendered worthless and underserving of compassion, were also left in the streets after the hurricane swept through New Orleans. The disposable are the new living dead, invisible, and relegated to zones of terminal exclusion and impoverishment. The disposable are the unknowable, invisible, and powerless marginalized by class and race and forced … [Read more...]

"Institutionally, social services developed out of the bourgeoisie's need to stabilize the forces of capitalism and white supremacy. US industrial capitalism's tendency to consolidate and monopolize threatened to undo the white supremacist system of African chattel bondage. The Homestead Act of 1862 was in a way a "social service" legislated in response to the displacement of white farmers and the inability of industrial capital to provide full employment to the white proletariat. This Act gave government subsidies and land allotments to White Americans and European immigrants, provided they settle West of the Mississippi river. To pave way for White settlement, the US government brutally … [Read more...]

"As ever, then, the imaginations of urban life in colonized zones interacts powerfully with that in the cities of the colonisers. Indeed, the projection of colonial tropes and security exemplars into postcolonial metropoles in capitalist heartlands is fuelled by a new ‘inner city Orientalism’. This relies on the widespread depiction amongst rightist security or military commentators of immigrant districts within the west’s cities as ‘backward’ zones threatening the body politic of the western city and nation. In France, for example, postwar state planning worked to conceptualize the mass, peripheral housing projects of the banlieues as ‘near peripheral’ reservations attached to, but distant … [Read more...]

"If it were possible to find a method of becoming master of everything which might happen to a certain number of men, to dispose of everything around them so as to produce on them the desired impression, to make certain of their actions, of their connections, and of all the circumstances of their lives, so that nothing could escape, nor could oppose the desired effect, it cannot be doubted that a method of this kind would be a very powerful and a very useful instrument which governments might apply to various objects of the utmost importance." Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon;1787-1791 "It is not when one has taken everything away that nothing is left, rather, nothing is left when things are … [Read more...]

"It is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that [refined and spiritual things] make their presence felt in the class struggle.They manifest themselves in this struggle [of the oppressed] as courage, humour and fortitude.They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory past and present of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history." Walter Benjamin Letter to Gershom Scholem "Architecture is cultic, it is mark, symbol, sign, expression." Hans Hollein "Art is reparative, its intention is to restore psychic health, and its … [Read more...]

"...two principles of coherence: a proclaimed coherence, of scientific appearance, which asserts itself by proliferating outward signs of scientificity, and a hidden coherence, mythic in its principles." Pierre Bourdieu "So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. " William … [Read more...]

"The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bed- room; It is so — I witnessed the corpse — there the pistol had fallen." Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass "...we now know that a rejuvenated CIA has run a full-scale torture program, kidnapped terror suspects off global streets, and still oversees drone assassination campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. In addition, it continues to resist Congressional oversight of its torture activities. As yet, the Agency, tasked with “vetting” a 6,000-page report on its “interrogation methods” prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee, has refused to allow the release of any part of the account. Even Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chair, … [Read more...]

"In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.” John Pilger "If place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with … [Read more...]