April 2011
10 posts
“Surrealism’s models would be pornography. The things that happen in the...”
– Adorno, “Looking back on Surrealism” (in Noten zur Literatur I, 1956). Surrealist images mimic how pornographic images change the viewer in ways that change the appearance of the image.
download all 12 issues of La Révolution... →
“Dada is not limited to any art. The bartender in the Manhattan Bar, who pours...”
– Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Poets and Painters (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 28. Quoted in Grindon.
“man …is only fully a human being when he plays.”
– Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, 1795 (Thoemmes: Bristol, 1994), p. 107. “This moral function attributed to play owes much to Kant, who makes a distinction between crude ‘mere enjoyment’, excluded from his definition of the...
“Nous rions mais jamais en même temps que vous.”
– The Letterist International explore new frontiers in obnoxiousness (Les Lèvres nues 9 (Nov 1956)).
cooptation and compartmentalized reception
One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its period of decline is that while it respects the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic creation, it resists actual creations when they first appear, then eventually exploits them. This is because it needs to maintain a certain degree of criticality and experimental research among a minority, but must take care to channel this...
all 12 issues of the Internationale Situationniste... →
Alain Badiou's letter to Jean-Luc Nancy about... →
1 tag
“It would be as stupid to hang urban planners as it would be to execute Eichmann....”
– Raoul Vaneigem, “Comments against Urbanism” (IS #6, 1961)
1 tag
March 2011
9 posts
2 tags
“Comment l’individu se voit-il devant la masse énorme de...”
– Lefebvre, preface to 2nd edition of CVQ (1958), 102
“How does the individual see himself in relation to the enormous mass of the State? As a tiny dot, as a shadow. He becomes for himself an unreal apparition — but, at the same time, by an absolute contradiction, political fictions...
“The use of everyday life, in the sense of a consumption of lived time, is...”
– Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life,” SI bulletin, May 1961
1 tag
À ce jour, la classe dominante réussit à se servir des loisirs que le prolétariat révolutionnaire lui a arrachés, en développant un vaste secteur industriel des loisirs qui est un incomparable instrument d’abrutissement du prolétariat par des sous-produits de l’idéologie mystificatrice et des goûts de la bourgeoisie. Il faut probablement chercher du côté de cette abondance de...
“Ne vous inquiétez pas : c’est la lutte finale.”
– Guy Debord, flyer for a protest in Turin in favor of unitary urbanism (1956)
2 tags
“In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are...”
– Slavoj Žižek, “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks,” LRB Vol. 33 No. 2 · 20 January 2011, pp.9-10
“… the prophetic tone favored by the New Philosophers, the one that...”
– Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (UChicago, 2002) 161
“Lord Strabolgi: My Lords, can my noble friend say what is the anticipated life...”
– House of Lords Debate, 3 November 1997, cc 1221-1224, quoted in Philippa Carling and Antony Seely, “The Millennium Dome,” House of Commons Library Research Paper 98/32, 12 March 1998, 41
February 2011
8 posts
1 tag
“The tendency to occultism is a symptom of a consciousness [that] has lost the...”
– Theodor Adorno, “Theses against Occultism,” Minima Moralia.
“DeLillo’s parataxis can tell us how his characters might think, or avoid...”
– John Mullan, “And then he ate the apple…” The Guardian (2 August 2003).
poverty sims →
“high-rent contrarian rant delivered by post-structuralist vagabond with hermetic...”
– Robert MacFarlane pigeonholes Iain Sinclair’s style for the TLS, 2005
“‘I am determined to do all I can to ensure that the Dome stands as an enduring...”
– Iain Sinclair, Sorry Meniscus: Excursions to the Millennium Dome (1999)
“He’s got to avoid becoming a parody of himself. There’s a risk of...”
– Patrick Wright on Iain Sinclair
January 2011
1 post
palais idéal, take two →
December 2010
3 posts
Wild writing: Barthes on graffiti
“In a 1968 article on advertising published originally in Italian… Barthes writes of the kind of advertisement that appears on walls (of streets and metros). He valorizes this by associating it with the anthropological importance of the gesture of mural inscription:
Dans son introduction au beau livre de Franco Vaccari sur les graffiti muraux, Le Tracce (Sampietro, ed. 1967),...
November 2010
3 posts
Media Coverage of the Riots in Belleville, June... →
Chinese residents claim to be targets of attack and protest about inadequate police protection. Indymedia denounced the protests as reactionary because the protesters singled out Arabs and Blacks as assailants.
aung sang suu kyi has the awesomest swagger →
October 2010
5 posts
“It looks like a science fiction movie; it smells like revolution.”
– Description of Marseilles after over a week of garbage collector strikes (inhabitant interviewed by BBC World Service, 21/10/10)
Body art in France →
full-text of Quasimodo, N°5 “Art à contre-corps” 2e édition 1999, 192 pages, illustré, ÉPUISÉ.
http://subtopia.blogspot.com →
on war and cities
Theory as Communicative Practice: Ethics and...
“If we conceive of theory as a purely analytical project then the dangers of cooption and complicity are extraordinary. So one needs to think both in terms of ethics and affect, and of course as soon as you introduce either of those then you’ve moved beyond a formal theoretical apparatus and you start to engage with creative artists in all kinds of extraordinary ways.
But you also...
2 tags
“Beau comme une vague, sympathique comme une catastrophe”
– Simone Kahn’s description of Antonin Artaud in a letter to her cousin, Denise Lévy (3 October, 1924). SK was married to André Breton at that time.
September 2010
2 posts
encouraging words
Some day you will die. Lying on your sick bed about to breathe your last, you will be assailed by every kind of pain, Your mind will be filled with fears and anxieties and you will not know where to go or what to do, Only then you will realize you have not practiced well. The skandhas/aggregates (matter, sensations, conceptions, impulses and consciousness) and the four elements in you ...
“Le jour où Ballard est mort, je serai seul avec ses héritiers pour lire le...”
– Benjamin Berton, a true believer, two years ago.
August 2010
8 posts
“La pire aliénation, l’aliénation absolue—pour autant que ce mot ait...”
– Lefebvre on the comforts of alienation, CVQ II, 211
1 tag
“Private property has made us so stupid and inert that an object is ours only...”
– Marx, Nationalökonomie und Philosophie, quoted in Benjamin, Arcades Project (210)
1 tag
“Pleine comme un oeuf, vide comme l’abîme”
– Abraham Moles, quoted by Lefebvre in CVQ II, 94.
“What kind of living does one make when one makes a living?
[Quelle vie...”
– Lefebvre (CVQ II, 74)
“For the [unskilled] worker, life both at work and outside of work have faded...”
– Lefebvre on the status of workers in the transition from artisanal to industrialized production (CVQ II, 73)
“‘Alienation’—I know it is there in the love song I sing or the...”
– Lefebvre, CVQ I, 160-1/148
“The less you eat and drink, the fewer books you buy, the less frequently you...”
– Marx on the opposition between being and having, quoted in Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne vol. 1 (1958, 173)
July 2010
10 posts
wheat
In the 18th century, it took 200 hours of labour to produce 5 kilos (a quintal) of wheat.
In 1938-9, it took 35 hours.
In 1979, it took 7 hours.
(figures from Jean Fourastié, Les trente glorieuses, 221)