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Had ya fooled for a second there! Didn't I! Didn't? I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with 'Second Brain' for the time being, but I do have a few ideas . . . in the meanwhile I use it as a storage site for this list of quotes that I will do something with some day (no really).
QUOTES (WITH COMMENTARIES)Sections? Work; Alienation; Capital; Labour (Productive Activity what is productive? Is it a historical activity ie. can their be Culture, Totality, Nature etc. ?
“Hoping for promotion is a far cry from hoping - albeit insanely - for life everlasting. Our only gods are heroes of the fatherland, heroes of the shop floor, heroes of the fridgidaire, heroes of fragmented thought . . . How are the mighty fallen!”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 108“The time they [‘professional revolutionaries’] have for creative activity they squander handing out leaflets, putting up posters, demonstrating or keckling local politicians. They become militants, fetishising action because others are doing their thinking for them.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 109“. . . aesthetics is carnival paralysed . . . the aesthetic element, the element of pose, corresponds to the element of death secreted by everyday life.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 109“And indeed, what better commodity than an aesthetic of nothingness.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 114“The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be barterd.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 112“. . . the is an ambiguity in the very idea of ‘making a work of art,’ for it embraces both the lived experience of the artist and the sacrifice of this experience to the abstraction of a creative substance, ie. to the aesthetic form. The artist relinquishes the lived intensity of the creative moment in exchange for the durability of what he creates, so that his name may live on in the funereal glory of the museum. And this desire to produce a durable work is the very thing that prevents him from living imperishable instants of real life.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 113“[God is] the Grand External Object, as Laiutremont called him.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 117“. . . what makes capitalist exploitation so repulsive is the fact that it occurs between ‘equals.’”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 121“the passion for play is no longer alienating if the person who gives himself up to it seeks play in the whole of life - in love, in thought, in the construction of situations.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 121“Revolution was the bourgeoisie’s finest invaention. It is also the running noose which will help it take its leap into oblivion.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 124“the uses of the media guarantee a kind of noisy insignificance.”1988
Guy Debord COMMENTARY ON THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Verso 1998 p. 15“Why do trains carry at the same season of each year a number of travellers which varies so little? It is the lack of coincidences in such matters which is impressive.”1924
Andre Breton INTRODUCTION TO THE DISCOURSE ON THE PAUCITY OF REALITY in WHAT IS SURREALISM? SELECTED WRITINGS Pluto Press 1989 p. 19“Things said over and over again today meet a solid barrier. They have riveted us to this vulgar universe. It is from them that we have aquired this taste for money, these constraining fears, this feeling for the native land, this horror of our destiny.”1924
Andre Breton INTRODUCTION TO THE DISCOURSE ON THE PAUCITY OF REALITY in WHAT IS SURREALISM? SELECTED WRITINGS Pluto Press 1989 p. 25“Pallid day (when nothing shines by its own light) slinks and insinuates and suggests that we compromise with a sad and lackluster reality.”
Hakim Bey TAZ Semiotext p. 64“As a class rent by contradictions, the bourgeoisie founds its domination on the transformation of the world, yet refuses to transform itself. It is thus a movement wishing to avoid movement.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 147“Now although the habit of change is intrinsically subversive, it is also the main prerequisite to the functioning of consumer society. People have to change cars, fashions, ideas, etc., all the time.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 147“Capital has realised the negation of classes - by means of mystification, since it retains the conflicts and collisions that characterise the existence of classes. The reality is the despotism of capital. It is capital we must face now, not the past.”
Jaques Camatte THE WANDERING OF HUMANITY in THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE Semiotext p. 60“The proletariat enables capitalism to continue by acting against the system. Here we find the origin of the historical crisis of capitalism. And it is in this respect that capitalism is a society pregnant with revolutionary prospects. Slavery or serf society functioned as far as the exploited did not struggle against the system. But capitalism can fudnction only insofar as those whom it exploits actively oppose everything the system seeks to impose upon them.”1959?
Cornelius Castoriadis ON THE CONTENT OF SOCIALISM II p. 94“The forces of the artistic spectacle must be dissolved so that their equipment can pass into the arsenal of individual dreams. Once they are thus armed, there will be no question of treating them as fantasies. This is the only way in which the problem of the realisation of art can be framed.”1967
Raoul Vaneigem THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AK Press p. 245“The spectacle is money for contemplation only, for here the totality of use has already been bartered for the totality of of abstract representation. The spectacle is not jiust the servant of pseudo-use - it is al’ready, in itself, the pseudo-use of life.”1967
Guy Debord THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Zone Books 1994 Thesis 49“. . . even though the last unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical era may view the productive progression through which history has unfolded as itself the object of that history.”1967
Guy Debord THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Zone Books 1994 Thesis 74reification of the social process ‘revolution’ into an aspect (determinate?) of the forces of production.
“For Marx it is the struggle - and by no means the law - that has to be understood.”1967
Guy Debord THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Zone Books 1994 Thesis 81re: Marx’s thinking as ‘science’
“The revolutionary point of view, so long as it persists in espousing the notion that history in the present period can be mastered by means of scientific knowledge, has failed to rid itself of all its bourgeois traits.”1967
Guy Debord THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Zone Books 1994 Thesis 82Hayes: with the triumph of ‘democratic’ and ‘bureaucratic’ capital over ‘fascist’ capital, structuralism rises to a position of mirroring the decline of the subject ie. we are bearers of ‘democracy’, ‘soviet-power’ etc. Structuralism is the plaintive ballad seeking the lost bosom of the Absolute. Post-structuralism is its immediate sequel, pointing to the Absolute through its abscence! Philosophers today seek to be capital’s priesthood. They are perhaps more recognisable as fools and jesters who provide useful services in the ‘realm of ideas’ ie. continuing that ‘noble’ duty of diverting theory from its practical realisation.
“Bodies (or the herd) are discontinuity. Bodies are seperated in space and feel interdependant, because discontinuity would be destroyed if it did not strive for continuity.”1897
Alfred Jarry DAYS AND NIGHTS Atlas Press 1989 p. 40“As a result of these reciprocal relationships with Things . . . he [Sengle] no longer made any distinction at all between his thoughts and actions nor between his dreaming and waking; and perfecting Liebniz’ definition, that perception is a hallucination which is true, he saw no reason not to say: hallucination is a perception which is false, or more exactly: faint, or better still: forseen (remembered sometimes, which is the same thing). And he believed that above all there are only hallucinations, or perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days (despite the book’s title, which is why it has been chosen), and that life is continuous; yet that one would never be aware of its continuity, nor even that life exists, without these pendulum movements; and life is primarily verified by the beating of the heart. It is very important that there are heartbeats; but that the diastole is a rest for the systole, and that these little deaths support life, is merely a routine statement not an explanation, and Sengle did not give a damn for it and its formulator, some pedant or other.”1897
Alfred Jarry DAYS AND NIGHTS Atlas Press 1989 p. 83“To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing . . .”
Nietzsche THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA Prologue 3“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.”
Nietzsche THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA Prologue 4“The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated, and no tall tree will be able to grow in it. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir!”
Nietzsche THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA Prologue 5has that time arrived? Has the almost total occupation of social space by the commodity form achieved this? What of the ‘desire’ to go beyond man? Aufheben!
“No shepard and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
Nietzsche THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA Prologue 5-see Vanheigm on ‘Masters without Slaves’
“The society of the commodity, soon discovering that it must reinstate the passivity with which it had to shake to its foundations in order to inaugurate its own unchallenged rule, now found that, for its purposes, ‘Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract was the most fitting form of religion’ (Capital).”1967
Guy Debord THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Zone Books 1994 Thesis 144“There is nothing common to the corpselike obedience of a dominated class and the organised rebellion of a class struggling for its liberation.”
Rosa Luxemburg ORGANISATIONAL QUESTIONS OF RUSSIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY in SELECTED POLITICAL WRITINGS Monthly Review Press 1971 p. 291“Democracy, thus, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership [of the French Revolution]. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 30“Discovered”? Created perhaps? Vanheigm and the bourgeoisie’s ‘graetest discovery’ - revolution
“As Hegel formulated it, in his ‘Philosophy of History,’ it was not so much from as through slavery that man aquired freedom.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 34-35“. . . man has to fight to gain freedom; thereby is revealed ‘the negative character’ of modern society.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 35“If to be aware of the idea - to be aware, ie. that men are aware of freedom as their essence, aim, and object - is matter of speculation, still this very idea itself is the actuality of men - not something which they have, as men, but which they are.”
Hegel PHILOSOPHY OF MIND quoted in Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM p. 36“To hold fast the positive in its negative, and the content of the presupposition in the result, is the most important part of rational cognition.”
Hegel SCIENCE OF LOGIC quoted in Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM p. 37Marx: “In place of human actuality Hegel has placed Absolute Knowledge.”
“Becaiuse Hegel could not concieve the masses as ‘Subject’ creating the new society, the Hegelian philosophy - though it had replaced the viewing of things as ‘things in themselves,’ as dead impenetrable matter - was compelled to return to Kant’s idea of an external unifier of opposities. Hegel had destroyed all dogmatisms except the dogmatism of the ‘backwardness of the masses.’”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 38“. . . in Hegel’s Absolute there is imbedded, though in abstract form, the full development of the social individual, or what Hegel would call individuality ‘purified of all that interferes with its universalism, ie. freedom itself.’”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 39“In Hegel the Absolute is the vision of the future.”
“This bond of continuity with the past is the lifeblood of the dialectic. Hegel envisions a society where man realises all of his human potentialities and thus achieves consciously what the realm of nature achieves through blind necessity.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press p. 36“They are [Hegel’s categories], in actuality, the reflection in man’s mind of processes going on in the material world. It is equally true that the summation of Hegel’s own analysis is that actuality, the true form of reality, requires freedom, requires man to be free.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 41note to myself - see Nietzsche ‘Twilight of the Idols’ re: senses
“Hegel, said Marx, could not carry out his dialectical logic consistently becaiuse he remained from first to last a philosopher seeking to trace the logical movement, not of the worker, but of the intellectual. Hegel had established the principles. He had discovered them out of the devastating critique which the French Revolution made of all previous philosophy. But the philosopher, working only with ideas in his head and in the heads of others, cannot solve the problems of society. He cannot create new unities. He can only summarise those already reached. He is always standing apart from the real process of nature - which is human nature working on nature - and constantly transforming it into a new unity with himself.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 42“From the equality of exchange in general arose the inequality of exchange of the particular ‘commodity’ - labour.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 46“Marx . . . could see . . . that the growth of capital might lead to its concentration in the ‘hands of one single capitalist,’ Marx insisted that the abolition of private property means a new way of life, a new social order only if ‘freely associated individuals,’ and not abstract ‘society,’ become the masters of the socialised means of production.”1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 62“. . . if man can be satisfied only be recognition, the man who behaves as a Master will never be satisfied. And since . . . man is either Master or Slave, the satisfied man will necessarily be a Slave; or more exactly, the man who has been a Slave, who has passed through Slavery, who has ‘dialectically overcome’ his slavery.”
Alexander Kojeve INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF HEGEL Cornell University Press 1993 p. 19-20“. . . the truth of autonomous Consciousness is slavish Consciousness.”
Alexander Kojeve INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF HEGEL Cornell University Press 1993 p. 20“The complete, absolutely free man . . . will be the Slave who has ‘overcome’ his slavery. If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history of the working Slave.”
Alexander Kojeve INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF HEGEL Cornell University Press 1993 p. 20“The slave is subordinated to the Master. Hence the Slave esteems, recognises, the value and the reality of ‘autonomy’, of human freedom. However, he does not find it realised in himself; he finds it only in the Other. And this is his advantage.”
Alexander Kojeve INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF HEGEL Cornell University Press 1993 p. 21“every bodily change is a mental change and vice versa, since there is only one Nature, and one order of natural events or causes, which expresses itself, or is concieved by us, under the two Attributes.”1951
Stuart Hampshire SPINOZA Penguin Books 1967 p. 83“But in Spinoza . . . [nominalism] is used to lead to the opposite conclusion; we are able to regonise the inadequacy of our common-sense knowledge and our ordinary classifications only because we possess a norm or standard of genuine knowledge with which to contrast them.”1951
Stuart Hampshire SPINOZA Penguin Books 1967 p. 117expand re: scientia intuitiva - intuitive knowledge, ie. knowledge of the highest grade
“. . . Spinoza thinks of God rather as a verb and all existent things as modes of this activity. The world is not a collection of things but a conflagration of Act whose inumerable flames are but one fire.”
T. S. Gregory INTRODUCTION in Spinoza ETHICS Heron Books p. X“Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human development - the form of human society.”1844
Marx ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS in EARLY WRITINGS Penguin 1975 p. 358Stupid Colleti! see his banal comments in above
“The images that rule us mark the success of that which is not ourselves, which haunts us out of ourselves.”1974
Ratgeb (Raoul Vaneigmn) CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE INTENDED TO BE DISCUSSED, CORRECTED, AND PRINCIPALLY PUT INTO PRACTICE WITHOUT DELAY Bratach Dubh Editions - 7 1981“If I doubt my existence, it is not existence which I wish to contest, only that it should be mine.”
Jaques Rigaut LORD PATCHOGUE in 4 DADA SUICIDES Atlas Press 1995 p. 99“The reason why science turns keen-witted and even free-thinking minds ino imbeciles is that, despite everything, it is in part true.”1926
Julien Torma EUPHORISMS in 4 DADA SUICIDES Atlas Press 1995 p. 156“To paraphrase Marx, poetry has no homeland because it belongs to all times and all places.”
Peret THE DISHONOUR OF POETS in DEATH TO THE PIGS AND OTHER WRITINGS p. 206“[Poetry is a] Tutelary god with a thousand faces . . . it is here called love, there freedom, elsewhere science . . . Poetry’s innumerable detractors, true and false priests, more hypocritical than the priesthood of any church, false witnesses of every epoch, accuse it of being a means of escape, a flight from reality, as if it were not reality itself, reality’s essence and exaltation.”
Peret THE DISHONOUR OF POETS in DEATH TO THE PIGS AND OTHER WRITINGS p. 200“In a real-life argument there is something true in every idea. Nothing is wholly or ‘indisputably’ true, nothing is absolutely absurd or false. By comparing theses thought spontaneously seeks a higher unity. Each thesis is false in what it asserts absolutely but true in what it asserts relatively (its content); and it is true in what it denies relatively (its well-founded criticism of the other thesis) and false in what it denies absolutely (its dogmatism).”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 27po-mos? historical (relative? transitory, temporality/process?) thought . . .
“The being of a finite thing is to have in its inner being as such the seed of its passing away; the hour of its birth is also the hour of its death.”
Hegel in Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 33“For him [Hegel] the starry heavens are no more marvellous than an eruption of the skin.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 49“To start with, consciousness was simply animal and biological, a ‘herd-consciousness.’ Subsequently it has become real and effective, especially with the division of labour. However, the moment there is a division of labour into material and spiritual, the moment consciousness exists for itself, it is able to imagine itself as being something other than the consciousness of the existing praxis. It loses sight of its own pre-conditions. The new-born reflection of the conscious individual breaks up the social totality at the precise moment when this totality is developing and expanding but also when, with the division of labour, any activity is no longer anything more than a fragmentary one. Thus do ideological fantasies become possible.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 70-71Hayes: other ‘splits/creations’ - man & women
“Selfishness that is in harmony with itself transforms each man into a secret police state. The spy Reflection watches over every movement of mind and body. Every action, every thought, every vital manifestation becomes a matter for reflection, that is for the police. Selfishness that is in harmony with itself consists in the tearing asunder of man, who is divided into natural instinct and reflection (into creature and creator, an internal plebs and police force) . . .”
Marx quoted in Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 76-77the slogan “kill the cop inside yourself” is a distillation of Marx (of course!)
“. . . economic relations are not the only relations but the simplest ones, the ones found again as ‘moments’ in complex relations.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 85“As currently interpreted, dialectical materialism looks on ideas, institutions and cultures - on consciousness - as a frivolous and unimportant superstructure above an economic substance which alone is solid. True materialism is quite different; it determines the practical relations inherent in every organised human existence and studies them inasmuch as they are concrete conditions of existence for cultures or ways of life. The simple relations, moments and categories are involved, historically and methadologically, in the richer and more complex determinations, but they do not exhaust them. The given content is always a concrete totality. This complex content of life and consciousness is the true reality which we must attain and elucidate. Dialectical materialism is not an economism. It analyses relations and then reintegrates them into the total movement.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p.85“The categories are abstract, inasmuch as they are elements obtained by the analysis of the actual given content, and inasmuch as they are simple general relations involved in the complex reality. But there can be no pure abstraction. The abstract is also concrete, and the concrete, from a certain point of view, is also abstract. All that exists for us is the concrete abstract. There are two ways in which the economic categories have a concrete, objective reality: historically (as moments of the social reality) and actually (as elements of the social objectivity). And it is with this double reality that the categories are linked together and return dialectically into the total movement of the world.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 88-89Well, der! Lefebvre
“The objectivity of the commodity, of the market and of money is both an appearance and a reality.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 92“Fetishism is both a mode of existence of the social reality, an actual mode of consciousness and human life, and an appearance or illusion of human activity. Primitive fetishism and magic expressed Nature’s dominance over man and the illusory sway of man over Nature. Economic Fetishism expresses the dominance over man of his own products and the illusory sway of man over his own organisation and artefacts. Instead of stemming from an ethnographic description, the new Fetishism and fetishised life stems from a dialectical theory of objectivity and the creative activity, of appearance and reality, of concrete and abstract.”
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 93“We cease to be alone not when we are with someone else but when we are ourselves someone else: another reality than ourselves for ourselves - another reality than the object for itself. A meeting of pure subjects (monads) would not draw them out from their solitude. A being who is not the object of a desire for another being has no determinate existence.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 116“Natural man as such is passive. Inasmuch as he feels his passivity, that is, the thrust of his desire together with the impotence of that desire, he becomes passionate. ‘Passion,’ says Marx, ‘is an essential force in the man tended towards his object.’”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p.117“Every product - every object - is therefore turned in one direction towards Nature, and in another towards man. It is both concrete and abstract. It is concrete in having a given substance, and still concrete when it becomes part of our activity, by resisting or obeying it, however. It is abstract by virtue of its definite, measurable contours, and also because it can enter into a social existence, be an object amongst other similar objects and become the bearer of a whole series of new relations additional to its substantiality (in language, or else in the quantitative evaluation of society as a commodity).”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 119“. . . to abstract means to separate or detach.”
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p.121“Abstraction is a practical power.”
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 121“The so-called history of the world is nothing other than the production of man through human labour.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p.129“In the course of his history, the human being becomes isolated in one sense from Nature, yet in this way he contracts with it a more profound relationship and a higher unity.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 131“Man is a . . . being who contains his entire Becoming within himself and gradually brings it under control. His limitations and abstraction are transformed into a source of power; it is in fact the most limited thing about him - his abstract understanding, the ability to immobilise object and instants, instruments and concepts, in their separateness - which becomes the principle of this increasing power. Man’s consciousness expresses his authority over things, but also his limitation, since it can be attained only by way of abstraction and logic, and in the consciousness of the theoretical man who is alien to Nature . . . From out of his limitation man produces a determinate and human infinite, which envelops and liberates and overcomes the indefinite given in natural existence; this infinite might be called: the power of man, knowledge, action, love, Mind or, quite simply, the human.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 132“Human activity - the Praxis - introduces oppositions into the world, which it is able to do only by accentuating those already present there in embryo. It thus accentuates the character of those moments, aspects or properties of the real which have something distinct about them. It introduces into reality the oppositions of concrete and abstract, of necessity and chance, of causal determinism and finality. But at the same time it introduces, and produces dialectically, their unity.” 1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MAT p. 135-36“There remains an immense sector outside man’s control. Where Nature is concerned, this uncontrolled sector is, for man, fatality or brute chance. Within man himself, it is known as pure spontaneity, the unconscious, or else as his psychological or social destiny. It includes everything which human activity has so far been unable to orientate and consolidate, everything not yet ‘produced’ through man and for man.”
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MAT p. 137“Primitive man had a more developed sense of the world’s oneness (cf. the sociologists Mana) than the fragmented man of our modern society.”
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MAT p. 139“The presence of the uncontrolled sector is more fascinating, more terrifying for us than it was for primitive man. Our authority is undermined, our rationality threatened. It seems that we must, at all costs and by any means, take possession of this uncontrolled sector. Mythical activity therefore persists.”
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MAT p. 140Hayes: authority and rationality threatened in the jungle that is the “un-controlled sector”
“If Reason remains purely internal it cannot fail to succumb to external authority.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM p. 141“The sum-total of determinisms is thus a vast product of activity, an immense object: the World. This object must be understood partly in terms of Nature and partly in terms of the productive activity, which is itself a whole not absolutely separate from Nature. It is absurd, in any case, to try and picture Nature ‘in itself’; in terms of determinism Nature cannot in itself be either indeterminate or determinate. ‘Pure’ Nature, that supremely concrete existence, is also, for us, the emptiest of abstractions.”1939
Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM Johnathon Cape 1968 p. 143“We cannot imagine, express, measure, depict movement, without interrupting continuity, without simplifying, coarsening, dismembering, strangling that which is living. The representation of movement by means of thought always makes coarse, kills - and not only by means of thought, but also by sense-perception, and not only of movement, but every concept. And in that lies the essence of dialectics. And precisely this essence is expressed by the formula: the unity, identity of opposites.”1914
Lenin PHILOSOPHICAL NOTEBOOKS quoted in GRUNDRISSE Penguin p. 28 (note 22)Hayes: Interruption is a part of continuity. The problem is not the ongoing conscious abstraction of actuality that is the problem (as this is how we both apprehend and change our existence), but the substitution of sensual perception and representations made through an empiricism of the senses, for actuality(totality). The map is not the territory (topology and empiricism??), but its development, its actual becoming, is a damned important part (moment?) of the critique and contestation of the present social order. Quote Blake AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE
“Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so does the proletariat find its intellectual weapons in philosophy . . . Philosophy is the head of this emancipation, the proletariat is its heart. Philosophy cannot be realised without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished unless philosophy is realised.” 1939
Marx (EPM) quoted in Lefebvre DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM Jonathon Cape 1968 p. 18“He who tries to save his life will lose it. A handful, out of thousands, get rich, discover the other side of the world through the windows of sleeping cars. The money costs them dearly, and their is always the risk of never making it. To step over the bodies of a hundred others in order to become one of those thickheaded scum, the nouveau-riche ? To grab up sous, then francs, then gold louis out of the misery of other men and then to say that the world is well made, when everyone who fills his lungs with the fresh air of the beach is followed by an invisible train of men and women bent under their tasks, imprisoned by the machine as in a vice, imprisoned by hunger, by love, by the wish to live, for the wheels are grinding perfectly when all a man’s desires fall back on him with the weight of chains?” 1930?
Victor Serge BIRTH OF OUR POWER p.159“Hegel viewed the process whereby products, goods, works are created as a process of alienation in which man’s activity is swallowed up in the object; he viewed the alienating factor, namely, the abstractness of the thing created, as a process of human consciousness, of man reduced to mere consciousness of himself.” 1965?
Lefebvre THE SOCIOLOGY OF MARX p9“Nothing could be better in this ruined lodging [life]
Than not to have come, not to be, not to go.”
#17“It was a dream that you dreamed all your life”
#20 RUBA’IYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM (peng.)Three SI quotes:
“If this system were to go to the point of bluntly proclaiming that it imposes such an empty and despairing existence that the best solution for everyone would be to go hang themselves, it would still succeed in managing a healthy and profitable business by producing standardised ropes.” 1962
Debord GEOPOLITICS OF HIBERNATION in Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology p. 78The only difference today is that they would market a ‘diverse’ range of fashionable ropes!
“Today . . . in spite of certain appearance, the dominant world more than ever presents itself as permanent on the basis of an enrichment and an infinite extension of an irreplaceable model. The comprehension of this world can be based only on contestation. And this contestation is neither true nor realistic except insofar as it is a contestation of the totality.” 1962
Debord GEOPOLITICS OF HIBERNATION in Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology p81“the root of the prevailing absence of imagination cannot be understood unless one attains the imagination of the absence - that is, unless one conceives what is missing, forbidden and hidden, and yet possible, in modern life.” 1962
Debord GEOPOLITICS OF HIBERNATION in Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology p81“The Babylonian grid-city wants memory to persist thru time - smooth and empty time - but as Dali showed, memory persists only in the deliquescence of measured time.” 199?
Hakim Bey THE ARCHITECTONALITY OF PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICISM“Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself . . .” 1980?
Deleuze & Guattari A THOUSAND PLATEAUS p. 376“It was the human need to reach out for other humans, across the landscape, that fuelled the first signs of the creative explosion. Twenty thousand years later, the highest expression of Palaeolithic art may have had more to do with shutting them out.” 1995?
THE NEANDERTHAL ENIGMA p. 312“Collective culture is a composite culture, a product of the close and organic interdependence of all creative activity. It is the contrary of the competitive culture we know, which takes the absolute superiority of the strongest, of ‘genius’, as the unit by which to measure all activity - which results in an unparalleled waste of creative energies.” 1974
Constant NEW BABYLON p167The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations . . . theses observations are intended to disentangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration . . . seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.” 1940
Benjamin THESES ON . . . Thesis 10“. . . Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: ‘The saviour of modern times is called work. The . . . improvement . . . of labour constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.’ This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labour bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at their disposal. It recognises only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labour amounte to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient co-operative labour, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice caps would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labour which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labour.” 1940
Benjamin THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY Thesis 11COMMENTARY CAN INCLUDE(?) MARX ON NATURE FROM PARIS MANUSCRIPTS IE. “NATURE IS MAN’S INORGANIC BODY . . .” ETC.
“We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilisation: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilisation transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.” Marcuse ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN p9.
FIND MARCUSE’S FOLLOW-UP ON THE ‘NEW’ ALIENATION
“Commodities in general had been exchanged more or less sporadically for centuries before capitalism. Capitalism begins when the capacity becomes a commodity.” 1958
Raya Dunayevskaya MARXISM AND FREEDOM Pluto Press 1975 p. 138“We have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the transformation of social conditions into things, the indiscriminate amalgamation of the material conditions of production with their historical and social forms. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Mister Capital and Mistress Land carry on their goblin tricks as social characters and at the same time as mere things.”
Marx CAPITAL VOLUME III Charles H. Kerr & Co. Chicago, 1915 p.966