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“The truth is that one cannot choose the form of war one wants, unless from the start one has a crushing superiority over the enemy.”

- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Q13§24

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Art can serve a radical or revolutionary function, but it's not inherently subversive; art exists in a material context. Basically, my thinking on this is below (an excerpt from a philosopher, Fuck Theory, on patreon).

Words from Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin about “the vital role that artists play in society generally, and doubly so in the face of authoritarian regimes”.

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dream by mathias svalina

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“The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone your life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow. […] The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children - Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages; never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.”

— Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Eduction” (1929)

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[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.  There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.  The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like:  “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”  You live with this child, but you don’t know it.  You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy  At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy  You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.  Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you. 

/end id]

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Luck

by Langston Hughes

Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone is flung.

To some people Love is given, To others only heaven.

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“Ovid’s uncertainty over what kind of gods are in charge of his world in the Metamorphoses shows both that gods are unworthy of respect, and that it is dangerous not to respect them: the poem problematizes both belief and non-belief.”

James J. O'Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic

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Xu Zhen - Hello 

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anne sexton, “consorting with angels”

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David Bowie

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/ Samuel Gottscho, Times Square at Dusk, 1932

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That's what deconstruction is about, right? It's not just deconstruction. It's also construction. It's critical intimacy, not critical difference. So, actually speaking from inside. That's deconstruction. My teacher Paul de Man once said to another very great critic, Frederic Jameson, "Fred you can only deconstruct what you love." Because you are doing it from the inside, with real intimacy. You are kind of turning it around. It's that kind of critique... So, I turned around to think differently. Therefore, it was an engagement with that part of deconstruction, which looked at what is excluded when we construct systems. That part of deconstruction which said the best way to proceed is a very robust self-critique. And that part of deconstruction which said that you do not accuse what you are deconstructing. You enter it. Remember that critical intimacy? And you locate a moment where the text teaches you how to turn it around and use it.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

it’s a great time to be a hater, many things are bad and lots of stuff sucks. it’s also a terrible time to be a hater, because many people will insist that you have to like the bad thing because a company spent millions of dollars making it and it’s just not very nice to say it’s bad

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Posting is all I have

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The Face, September 1998.

Ph. Luis Sanchis