Ephectic

The neoliberal state, despite claims to the contrary, wields strong planning powers, which it enacts through close collaboration with corporate and financial interests. No one should be fooled anymore by the democratic aura that neoliberals still hope to evoke when they claim that the market decides. The decision-making market in such statements is a euphemism, at best, for the forces of wealth, including the banks and financial powers, that wield formidable instruments of planning. They determine, for example, what software will be developed, what dams will be built, who will buy a house, and so forth.

—Hardt and Negri (Declaration)

(Source: citizenalien)

svenskaaa:

I’m totally excited about tonight and Lynda’s other moments. It was just soooo amayyyyying!

hysteria [in capitalism is] a rebellion of the subject against being reduced to his/her “usefulness

—zizek (via jujutsu-with-zizek)

(via sinthematica)

Will talking about musics in the plural and flaunting an eclectic ecumenicism solve the problem? It seems, on the contrary, that this will merely conjure it away-as do certain devotees of an advanced liberal society. All those musics are good, all those musics are nice. Ah! Pluralism! There’s nothing like it for curing incomprehension […] I certainly am not going to preach in favor of an ecumenicism of musics, which seems to me nothing but a supermarket aesthetic, a demagogy that dare not speak its name and decks itself with good intentions the better to camouflage the wretchedness of its compromise.

—Pierre Boulez, “Contemporary Music and the Public”, Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn-Winter, 1985) 8-12.

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is inherently preferable to death is one of the most wide spread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species.This prejudice against death, however, is a kind of xenophobia. Discrimination against death is simply assumed good and right.

Absolutist faith in life is commonly a result of the unthinking conviction that existence or survival, along with an irrational fear of death, is “good.” This unreasoned conviction in the rightness of life over death is like a god or a mass delusion. Life is the “noble lie”; the common secular-religion of the West. For the conventional Westerner, the obvious leap of faith to make here is that one’s “self” and its preservation constitute the first measure of rationality.

Yet if one begins reasoning with the unquestioned premise that life is good, or that one’s own life or any life is justified, this is very different from bringing that premise itself to be questioned rationally. Anyone who has ever contemplated his or her own mortality might question the ultimate sanity of the premise of self-preservation. Even if it is possible to live forever, moreover, this makes not an iota of difference as to the question of the value of existence.

—Mitchell Heisman, Suicide Note (via heteroglossia)

(Source: eloquent-thought, via heteroglossia)

Proust’s entire work is constructed in this manner: successive loves, jealousies, periods of sleep, etc., detach themselves so fully from the characters that they themselves become infinitely changing characters, individuations without identity, Jealousy I, Jealousy II, Jealousy III…

—Gilles Deleuze, ‘Boulez, Proust and Time: “Occupying without counting”’, Angelaki, 3:2, 70.