Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things, or to the circulation of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.
— Guy Debord, Situationist Theses on Traffic, Situationist International Anthology, Edited and Translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, p. 70
We are excluded from real control over the vast material powers of our time. The communist revolution has not yet occurred and we are still living within the confines of decomposing old cultural superstructures. Henri Lefebvre rightly sees that this contradiction is at the heart of a specifically modern discordance between the progressive individual and the world, and he terms the cultural tendency based on this discordance “revolutionary-romantic.”
— Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Situationist International Anthology, Edited and Translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, p. 53-54
An international association of situationists can be seen as a coalition of workers in an advanced sector of culture, or more precisely as a coalition of all those who demand the right to work on a project that is obstructed by present social conditions; hence as an attempt at organizing professional revolutionaries in culture.
— Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Situationist International Anthology, Edited and Translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, p. 53-54
Art can cease being a report about the sensations and become a direct organization of more advanced sensations. The point is to produce ourselves rather than things that enslave us.
— Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Situationist International Anthology, Edited and Translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, p. 53-54
The goal of the situationists is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life by means of deliberately arranged variations of ephemeral moments. The success of these moments can reside in nothing other than their fleeting effect. The situationists consider cultural activity in its totality as an experimental method for constructing everyday life, a method that can and should be continually developed with the extension of leisure and the withering away of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).
— Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Situationist International Anthology, Edited and Translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, p. 53-54
Dialectical method excludes the possibility that there can be nothing more to say about the human or about any domain of human activity. On the contrary, it supposes that the knowledge of man and his realization are mutually inseparable and constitute a total process. To penetrate ever more deeply into the content of life, to seize it in its shifting reality, to be ever more lucid about the lessons it has to teach is—this is the essential precept of research.
— Henri Lefebvre, What is Possible, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, Verso, p. 182
From Lacanian Ink, by Alain Badiou; translated by Susan Spitzer
[…]
—Absolutely! Glaucon excitedly exclaimed. Pamper your body, stay “in shape”: that’s the creed of the upper classes. You always see them huffing and puffing at their tennis game, doing push-ups on their desks, practicing their golf swing out on their patios, and getting their faces remodeled, like Frankenstein’s creature, by the big-name plastic surgeons.
—They’d be better off studying philosophy, reading real books, learning poems by heart or reviewing the math they’ve forgotten since the days when they sweated over differential equations in order to pass the exam for getting into the Elite. And they’d be even better off modestly and carefully inquiring into the life of the vast majority of their fellow citizens. This fetishism of the body, this obsession with health everywhere stands in the way of the incorporation into truths, even the most ordinary ones. Someone starts talking to you about philosophy and you reply “headache,” or they talk about painting and you rattle off all your little bumps and bruises, and God forbid they should try to discuss serial music, well, then you start in on the whole saga of your bouts of diarrhea and lumbago.
—I’ve seen guys like that! Amantha agreed. I can’t stand them!
[…]
Art: Barbara Probst.
Exposure #27, N.Y.C. 249 W. 34th Street, 05.25.04, 9:27p.m., 2004
Ultrachrome ink on cotton paper
2 parts 112 x 168 cm/44 x 66 inches each
Edition of 5
I say it is necessary to be a voyant, make oneself a voyant. The Poet makes himself a voyant by a long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses. All the forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even. He will have to make his inventions smelt, touched, and heard. A language must be found. Moreover, every word [utterance] being an idea, the time of a Universal Language will come!
From the New Yorker
ABSTRACT: JOURNAL excerpts by Roland Barthes about mourning his mother, Henriette, who died at eighty-four, in October, 1977.
October 27th Every morning, around six-thirty, in the darkness outside, the metallic racket of the garbage cans. She would say with relief: the night is finally over (she suffered during the night, alone, a cruel business).
October 31st I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it—or without being sure of not doing so—although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.
November 5th Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly, Voilà “I’m here,” a word we used with each other all our lives). The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.
November 9th —Less and less to write, to say, except this (which I can tell no one).
November 11th Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say, I’ll be back at a specific time, or whom you can call to say (or to whom you can just say), Voilà, I’m home now.
April 3rd Despair: the word is too theatrical, a part of the language. A stone.
June 15th Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people’s stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): no sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.
From Mourning Diary
Via PhysOrg
God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.
In a hardening of the more accommodating position on religion that he took in his 1988 international best-seller A Brief History of Time, Hawking said the Big Bang was merely the consequence of the law of gravity.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist,” he writes in The Grand Design, which is being serialized by The Times newspaper.
“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”
Hawking has achieved worldwide fame for his research, writing and television documentaries despite suffering since the age of 21 motor neurone disease that has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesiser.
In A Brief History of Time, Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.
But in his latest work, Hawking cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own Solar System as a turning point against Isaac Newton’s belief that the Universe could not have arisen out of chaos.
“That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions—the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass—far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings,” he wrote.
(c) 2010 AFP
