John Steppling

"The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees, "mediated" by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the "functionaries." Gramsci (Prison Notebooks) "Art is always in some kind of relation with non-art. It does not, indeed it cannot, take place in a bubble cut off from the rest of culture." David Campany "If it is true that little boys bring back the past with bows and arrows, it is also true that youths easily become cliquish, seeking friends and above all a father, which their own one often was … [Read more...]

"...our new stories have a strong tendency to stabilize a world arranged according to the needs of techno-capitalism. The second is more subtle: they all involve the assumption that everything can be explained in mechanistic terms, that everything is, in a sense, robotic.” Curtis White “The American city has no problems that are its own because, in the last analysis, our cities aren’t cities at all. They are structures for the maintenance of social inequality.” Curtis White "In 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400% in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most … [Read more...]

"Soldiers had become insensitive living dead..." Erich Maria Remarque "In the midst of this dystopian nightmare, there is the deepening abyss of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the middle and working classes to the ranks of the precariat. Concentrations of wealth and income generate power for the financial elite and unchecked misery for most people, a fear/insecurity industry, and a growing number of social pathologies." Henry Giroux "The concept or notion of 'child' or 'childhood' was absolutely marginal until the modern period. However, with the gradual loss of the generational difference implied by modern, democratic, … [Read more...]

"Several issues are at stake here: the state of education in America, the paralysis of the critical faculty of students, the death of dissent, and the political orientation of the American intelligentsia." Guido Giacomo Preparata "The look of the past can be retrieved, preserved and disseminated in an unprecedented fashion. But awareness of history A an interpretation of the past succumbs to a faith in history as representation." Alan Sekula "The love of the world is night." Jean de Fecamp 11th century “I truly believe that the lack of adequate images is a danger… I have said that before and I repeat it again and again, and as long as I can speak I will speak out for that. If … [Read more...]

"Europe's old regimes were civil and political societies with distinct powers, traditions, customs, and conventions. Precisely because they were such integral and coherent social, economic, and cultural systems, they were exceptionally resilient...The old order's civil society was first and foremost a peasant economy and rural society dominated by hereditary and privileged nobilities. Except for a few bankers, merchants, and shipowners, the large fortunes and incomes were based in land. { } In fact, political society was the linchpin of this agrarian society of orders. Everywhere it took the form of absolutist authority systems of different degrees of enlightenment and headed by hereditary … [Read more...]

"Richard III, as he climbs great steps, gets smaller. As if he was seized and absorbed by the Grand Mechanism. Slowly he becomes only one of its wheels. He stopped being a hangman and became a victim." Jan Kott "Lear, as character rather than king, becomes the vehicle for another kind of ‘subjection’, evoking an ideological subjectivity in which the reader/spectator can ‘live’ an imaginary resolution of irreconcilable class projects." James H.Kavanagh "I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the screams of the world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear … [Read more...]

"So who is the Devil? The main characteristic of the Devil in Faust and in Christianity is that he is a seducer. He addresses himself to the wishes and desires of humans, mainly their wish to get rid of undesirable qualities or undesirable states of mind – weakness, ugliness, poverty, old age, loneliness and depression – and acquire instead beauty, power, love, sexual prowess. The price? Selling their souls to the Devil as Christianity would have it, or giving up their real self with all the unwanted qualities and take on the desired qualities in an act of delusion, as psychoanalysis would have it." Christina Wieland "The ambivalent identifications of love and hate occupy the same … [Read more...]

"...one could see the extermination camps as the culmination of a long process of the ‘destruction of reason’ – of the humanist reason inherited from the Enlightenment – to use Georg Lukács’ phrase. But their structure, at the intersection of several modern experiences and institutions (barracks, penitentiary, slaughterhouse, factory and bureaucratically rational administration), and their ideology (racial biology) remained the product of a European historical trajectory spread over several centuries, whose general line had been traditionally interpreted as humanity’s forward march towards Progress. This trajectory now proved to be the antechamber to hell." Enzo Traverso "For … [Read more...]