Slow Death vs a Crisis
“Often when scholars and activists apprehend the phenomenon of slow death in long-term conditions of privation they choose to misrepresent the duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives it as a fact in ordinary time. [...] Of course this deployment of crisis is often explicitly and intentionally a redefinitional tactic, a distorting or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event because as a structural or predictable condition it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis seems already to have called for.”
-Lauren Berlant, 2007 (“Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency.” Critical Inquiry 33. P. 760)
Dialogue and its Discontents
“The very notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not. The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated. Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes ‘agreement’ and ‘unity’ and indeed that those are the goals to be sought.”
-Judith Butler, 1990. (Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Pg. 20)
Independence
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”
-Frederick Douglass, 1852 - Independence Day Speech at Rochester, New York
things we have to fear
“If there is a fear that, by no longer being able to take for granted the subject, its gender, its sex, or its materiality, feminism will founder, it might be wise to consider the political consequences of keeping in their place the very premises that have tried to secure our subordination from the start.”
-Judith Butler, 1995 (“Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism.” In Feminist Contentions: a philosophical exchange. New York NY: Routledge. Pg 54)
Freedom of Space
“Moreover, whenever the man-made world does not become the scene of action and speech – as in despotically ruled communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm – freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance”
-Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom” (via (Notes On) Politics, Theory, and Photography).
epistemologically otherwise
“if we embrace epistemological relativism we neither have to give up our concern for proper ways of finding out about the world, not…abandon our political and ethical commitments. To be a relativist – to recognize multivocality – implies no obligatory commitment to immorality or opportunism. Neither does it necessarily lead us to indifference to distribution. Rather…it may lead us to an important form of intellectual caution: the sense that all knowledges are shaped, contingent, and in some other world could be otherwise.”
-John Law, 1991 (“Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations” In A Sociology of Monsters. New York: Routledge. Pg 6
Posturing
“And as for the style of detachment, surely the posture of neutrality is just that, a posture recognized as such, a charade acknowledged as a public secert by one and all? This would make most social scientists and their funding agencies even better material for study than Andalusians”
-Michael Taussig, 1999 (Defacement. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Pg 75)
Dialectic of Conjuring-Obfuscation
“The fact that the 18th century failed to note any connection between the critique it practiced and the looming crisis – no literal proof of an awareness of the link could be found – this very fact led to our thesis: that the critical process of enlightenment conjured up the crisis in the same measure in which the political significance of that crisis remained hidden from it. The crisis was as much exacerbated as it was obfuscated in the philosophy of history. Never politcally grasped, it remained concealed in historico-political images of the future which caused the day’s events to pale – events that became so much less inhibited in heading for an unexpected decision.”
-Reinhart Koselleck, 1959 (Critique and Crisis. Cambridge MA: MIT. Pg. 9)
Colonial-Style
“Under the colonial regime, anything may be done for a loaf of bread or a miserable sheep. The relations of man with matter, withing the world outside and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food. For a colonized man, in a contest of oppresion like that of Algeria, living does not mean embodying moral values or taking his place in the coherent and fruitful development of the world. To live means to keep on existing. Every date is a victory: not the result of work, but a victory felt as a triumph of life.”
-Frantz Fanon, 1963 (The Wretched of the Earth. Middelsex, UK: Penguin. Pg. 249)
On the Need to Forget
“Perhaps too much value has is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value, in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead…But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. there is simply too much injustice in the world…To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.
If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.”
-Susan Sontag, 2003 (Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Penguin. Pg. 103)
Breathtaking
“To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment – that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of ‘the modern,’ and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it absurt to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about wat and massive injustice and terror”
-Susan Sontag, 2003 (Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Penguin. Pg 98-9)
a moral view
“My Political view of anthropology is also a moral one. I believe…that making the things of this world a bit more intelligible, especially when they appear opaque, incomprehensible, and irrational, can make them less unjust, ineluctable, or unacceptable…I am convinced that social science would not be worth a moment’s attention or labor if it had no political role”
-Didier Fassin, 2007 (When Bodies Remember. Berkeley: U California Press. Pg xxii-xxiii)
Such a world as this one
“In a situation where economic forces drive people to become preoccupied with physical survival, the effects of leaving the value of a person undefined are far-reaching. In such a world, physical risks, abuses, and uncertainties escalate. The labor of the bio-robot appears ever more acceptable, desirable, and even normal.”
Adriana Petryna, 2002 (Life Exposed. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 3)
Flagrant violation
“It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between different sections of the people and to establish a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declarations of 1791) the rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should renew this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation (and is, therefore, urgently called for), and when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is in question and egoism should be punished as a crime…thus even in the period of its youthful enthusiasm, which is raised to fever pitch by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be only a means, who’s end is the life of civil society. It is true that its revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory.”
-Karl Marx, 1843. (“On the Jewish Question”. In The Marx-Engles Reader. 1978. Robert Tucker (ed). New York: WW Norton. Pg. 43-4.)
Generics
“If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”
-Hannah Arendt, 1951. (The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego CA: Harcourt Brace. Pg. 300)
A big if
“If emancipatory politics is to meet the challenge of neoliberal capitalism, politics needs to be retheorized not as a science or set of objective conditions but as a point of departure in specific and concrete situations. This means rethinking the very meaning of the political so that it can provide a sense of direction but no longer be used to provide complete answers. In short, such a politics entails that we ask why and how particular social formation have a specific shape and come into being, and what it might mean to rethink such formations in terms of opening up new sites of struggles and movements…In the absence of such languages and the public spheres that make them operative, politics becomes narcissistic, reductionist, and it caters to the mood of widespread pessimism and the cathartic allure of spectacle or the seductions of consumerism”
-Henry Giroux, ‘The Poltics of Hope in Dangerous Times’, 2004 (The Terror of Neoliberalism. Boulder CO: Paradigm. Pg 133-4)
Shall we overcome?
“[Marx's] analysis implies that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming the limits to democratic politics that result from systematically grounded exploitation and inequality; it also entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expanding the realm of historical contingency and, relatedly, the horizon of politics”
-Moishe Postone, 2006 (“History and Helplessness: mass mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism”. Public Culture 18(1). P 94)
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