"I am interested in the metaphor of the floor, rather than the safety net. The old idea was that everyone is up there playing on their circus apparatus and from time to time they fall. What the ILO is proposing is a rather different conception that says, no, everyone starts out here on the floor, and if you build something on the floor that is fine, but everyone is entitled to have that starting place. There is a new rationality of poverty embedded in that metaphor."
So it begins
"For urban populations long used to more stable sites like the cinema hall, piracy’s decentralized proliferation induced a narcotic disorientation of the senses. Populations conceived by state media policy as an abstract public now entered piracy’s landscape of infinite attractions, where images, sounds, objects, moved rapidly through networks of proliferation, small shops, bazaars, video theaters, friends. Piracy escapes the boundaries of space, of particular networks, of form, a before and after, a limit. Although it has complex strategies of deployment and movement, piracy is like no other form of expression, respecting no formal barriers. The lines between the surface and the inside, original and copy, which transfixed the Western modernist archive and its postmodern reformulations, are called into question in piracy. What appears is a subjectless subjectivity; there is no being behind doing, or, as Nietzsche said, the deed is everything."
Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s media urbanism, 112
"However, the political identities thus won evaporated in triumph … I suggest that their disappearance was due to their paradoxical formation: while crucial to the success of mobilization, while achieved with great effort and considerable violence, these identities were only incidental to the objective of gaining access to the entitlements of legal residence. It is important to understand that the pioneer associations only mobilized around this goal and that none presumed to continue beyond achieving it. None was organized around the denial of political rights, and none had the goal of autonomous political organization or even incorporation into the Plano Pilato’s public domain. However defiant of the law, however rebellious of government policy, their political actions were thus instrumental to their residential objectives. These objectives could only be met from within the system of local-level public assistance. Therefore, if in order to gain access to public resources, the candangos had to rebel, then admission to the system entailed foregoing any organized opposition to it."
James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, 271
"The greater their oppression the more pleased I feel because a mad dog has a very brief life"
Badshah Khan
"The knowing subject, the analyst or Sanskritist is rational, the persons who are the subjects of inquiry are, in relation to him, irrational. The knowledges of the latter are distorted representations of their own reality. They are knowledges that must be subjugated. They are knowledges that must be introduced, annotated, catalogued, broken up and analyzed in ‘data bases,’ apportioned out in monographs, reports, gazetteers, anthologies, readers, and course syllabi."
Ronald Inden
"The steady and arduous progress of science, which will ultimately celebrate its greatest triumph in an ontogeny of thought, will deal decisively with all these views. Its conclusion might perhaps end up with this tenet: That which we now call the world is the result of a number of errors and fantasies, which came about gradually in the overall development of organic beings, fusing with one another, and now handed down to us as a collected treasure of our entire past—a treasure: for the value of our humanity rests upon it. From this world of idea strict science can, in fact, release us only to a small extent (something we by no means desire), in that it is unable to break significantly the power of ancient habits of feeling. But it can illuminate, quite gradually, step by step, the history of the origin of that world as idea—and lift us, for moments at least, above the whole process. Perhaps we will recognize then that the thing-in-itself deserves a Homeric laugh in that it seemed to be so much, indeed everything, and is actually empty, that is, empty of meaning."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"It should be immediately evident that Arab society in fact cannot be discussed, because the Arabs all told number over a hundred million people and at least a dozen different societies, and there is no truly effective intellectual method for discussing all of them together as a single monolith. Any reduction of this whole immense mass of history, societies, individuals, and realities to ‘Arab society’ is therefore a mythification."
Edward Said
"I have often found that bleeding hearts have an ironic fear of their own blood."
House of Cards
