"{The} analysis of violence should be limited to demystifying the contradiction between custody and rehabilitation, so basic to asylums and prisons." Franco Basaglia "Adorno's philosophy took shape in dread recognition of the reversion of society to the primitive, a dynamic form which he only with luck preserved his own life. The problem that marks the center and circumference of his thought was the effort to comprehend and perhaps even circumvent this logic of progress as regression. Without a doubt the preeminent reason that his work must now be of vital concern in the United States is for what precisely can be learned from it in a nation that has so palpably entered primitive times. … [Read more...]
Anti Allegory
April 1, 2015 by 7 Comments
"The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.” Michael Parenti "The suppression of the sexual activity of children and teenagers is the basic mechanism which produces the characterial structures adapted to political, ideological, economic control...The repression of natural sexuality in the child, particularly of the genitality, makes the child apprehensive, … [Read more...]
That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said. Part two.
March 25, 2015 by 3 Comments
"The art world is divided into those people who look at Raphael as if it's graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it's Raphael, and I prefer the latter." Dave Hickey "This period led me into personal contact with Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno, and the writings of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse. Strange though it may sound I do not hesitate to say that the new development of Marxist thought which these people represent evolved as the theoretical and ideological superstructure of the revolution that never happened. In it re-echo the thunder of the gun battle for the Marstall in Berlin at Christmas 1918, and the shooting of … [Read more...]
That Which Will Not Let Itself be Said — part one
March 18, 2015 by 9 Comments
"The ruin, still with us after six centuries of obsession, is no longer the image of a lost knowledge, nor of the inevitable return of repressed nature, nor even of a simple nostalgia for modernity. Instead, it seems almost a means of mourning the loss of the aesthetic itself. Ruins show us again—just like the kitsch object—a world in which beauty (or sublimity) is sealed off, its derangement safely framed and endlessly repeatable." Brian Dillon "Unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity." Ludwig Wittgenstein "Blue and Brown Books" "Don Quixote is always at my side... Don Quixote is the best book of political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth... Better than … [Read more...]
State of the Art
March 10, 2015 by 13 Comments
"As a preamble to their performances, traditional storytellers in Majorca would say, 'It was and it was not so'". David Shields "The first apprentice we took was an old skateboarding friend of mine who was working as a garbageman. He just loved hanging around the shop so we offered him a spot, and now, a year and a half of training really hard later, he's working as a full-time barber. Because of all the photos we post on the internet, we think we're making it look more attractive to become a barber, and now we get a lot of guys asking for apprenticeships." Bertus, Schorem Haarsnijder en Barbie Rotterdam "Artists’ long-faltering, sporadic, but not inconsiderable identification … [Read more...]
House of Tards
March 3, 2015 by 31 Comments
"The same summer I was on Lewis, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player … [Read more...]
Someone To Watch Over Me
February 25, 2015 by 5 Comments
"A generalized sense of paranoia pervades modern culture. The loss of human solidarity, the split within the self and the split between the self and others, has led to a private and public suspiciousness on a greater scale than ever before." Rob Weatherill "Any survey of imperialism and its adversaries must note the pathetic role of most of the US and European left in recent years. Even in the most repressive moments of the Cold War, large anti-war movements challenged militarism, aggression, and war. But those movements have shriveled before indifference and ideological confusion. In the post-Soviet era, imperialism cynically appropriated the language of human rights and manipulated or … [Read more...]
The Melancholy Society
February 16, 2015 by 8 Comments
"It’s one of my favorite Darwin quotes—"He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke"—scribbled furtively in a notebook between visits to the London Zoo in the summer of 1838. Twenty-one years would pass before On the Origin of Species would shock the world, but Darwin already knew: If man wanted to comprehend his own mind, he’d need to train an unflustered gaze into the deep caverns of his animal past." Oren Harman "Make no mistake, abstract art is a form of mysticism." Robert Motherwell "Thus in doubting and liquidating the object, the modern artist shows his self-doubt and feeling of being liquidated by the world. He projects his own dissolution into the … [Read more...]
