junie > junie 's Quotes

“Theory is immanent to struggle; often enough it must hurry to catch up to a reality that lurches ahead. A theory of the present will arise from its lived confrontations, rather than arriving on the scene laden with backdated homilies and prescriptions regarding how the war against state and capital ought be waged, programs we are told once worked and might now be refurbished and imposed once again on our quite distinct moment. The subjunctive is a lovely mood, but it is not the mood of historical materialism.”
― Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

“A theory of riot is a theory of crisis. This is true at a vernacular and local level, in moments of shattered glass and fire, wherein riot is taken to be the irruption of a desperate situation, immiseration at its limit, the crisis of a given community or city, of a few hours or days. However, riot can only be grasped as having an internal and structural significance, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, insofar as we can discover the historical motion that provides its form and substance. We must then move to further levels, where the gathering instances of riot are inextricable from ongoing and systemic capitalist crisis. Moreover, the riot as a particular form of struggle illuminates the character of crisis, makes it newly thinkable, and provides a prospect from which to view its unfolding.

The first relation between riot and crisis is that of surplus. This seems already a paradox, as both crisis and riot are commonly understood to arise from dearth, shortfall, deprivation. At the same time, riot is itself the experience of surplus. Surplus danger, surplus information, surplus military gear. Surplus emotion. Indeed, riots were once known as “emotions,” a history still visible in the French word: émeute. The crucial surplus in the moment of riot is simply that of participants, of population. The moment when the partisans of riot exceed the police capacity for management, when the cops make their first retreat, is the moment when the riot becomes fully itself, slides loose from the grim continuity of daily life. The ceaseless social regulation that had seemed ideological and ambient and abstract is in this moment of surplus disclosed as a practical matter, open to social contest.

All these surpluses correspond to larger social transformations from which these experiences of affective and practical surplus are inextricable. These transformations are the material restructurings that respond to and constitute capitalist crisis, and which feature surpluses of both capital and population as core features. And it is these that propose riot as a necessary form of struggle.”
― Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

“It is in this regard that the riot is the sign of a situation that must in the end absolutize itself. Not because of some wild and affective nature of riot, though those who have had such experiences know that this is an astonishing force, but because of the still unfolding and still deteriorating situation in which it finds itself. Riot prime is not a demand but a civil war.

We have, then, something like a last contradiction. On the one hand, the riot must absolutize itself, move toward a self-reproduction beyond wage and market, toward the social arrangement that we define as the commune, always a civil war. On the other hand, the riot is entangled both internally and externally with the police function that seems
a blockage to any such absolutization. This contradiction offers some ways to think about the riots, rebellions, and uprisings of the years since the global market collapse of 2008—the historical particulars they embody, the failures they bear, the future they suggest.”
― Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

“History is not coherent; moreover, the politics of coherence tend to drive history in the least tolerable directions.”
― Joshua Clover, The Matrix

“Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. There would be something great and noble about initiating such a movement referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities. Thought of self and thought of other here become obsolete in their duality…. What is here is open, as much as this there. I would be incapable of projecting from one to the other. This-here is the weave and it weaves no boundaries.”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

“We cannot live outside our bodies, our friends, some sort of human cluster, and at the same time, we are bursting out of this situation. The question which poses itself then is one of the conditions which allow the acceptance of the other, the acceptance of a subjective pluralism. It is a matter not only of tolerating another group, another ethnicity, another sex, but also of a desire for dissensus, otherness, difference. Accepting otherness is a question not so much of right as of desire. This acceptance is possible precisely on the condition of assuming the multiplicity within oneself.”
― Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader

“To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it).”
― Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to aIl the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still sornething we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. ”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

“Relation cannot be 'proved' because its totality is not approachable. But it can be imagined, conceivable in the transport of thought. The accumulation of examples aims at perfecting a never complete description of the processes of relation, not circumscribing them or giving legitimacy to some impossible global truth. In this sense the most harmonious analysis is the one that poetically describes flying or diving. description is no proof: it simply adds something to Relation insofar as the latter is a synthesis-genesis that is never complete.”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

“An aesthetics of the earth?... Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion. Finding the fever of passion for the ideas of 'environment' (which I call surroundings) and 'ecology', both apparently such futile notions in these landscapes of desolation. Imagining the idea of love for the earth - so ridiculously inadequate or else frequently the basis for such sectarian intolerance - with all the strength of charcoal fires or sweet syrup.

Aesthetics of rupture and connection.

Because that is the crux of it, and almost everything is said in pointing out that under no circumstances could it ever be a question of transforming land into territory again. Territory is the basis of conquest. Territory requires filiation be planted and legitimated. Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. That is the reason it is worth defending against every form of alienation.

Aesthetics of a variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum.”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

“By this time, midway through winter,
I had become entirely fascinated with my spiritual melodrama.
Then it stopped.

Days passed, months passed and I saw nothing.
I continued to peer and glance, sitting on the rug in front of my sofa
in the curtainless morning

with my nerves open to the air like something skinned.
I saw nothing.
Outside the window spring storms came and went.

April snow folded its huge white paws over doors and porches.
I watched a chunk of it lean over the roof and break off
and fall and I thought,

How slow! as it glided soundlessly past,
but still—nothing. No nudes.
No Thou.

A great icicle formed on the railing of my balcony
so I drew up close to the window and tried peering through the icicle,
hoping to trick myself into some interior vision,

but all I saw
was the man and woman in the room across the street
making their bed and laughing.

I stopped watching.
I forgot about Nudes.
I lived my life,

which felt like a switched-off TV.
Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.
'No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind.

Emily does not feel them,'
wrote Charlotte the day after burying her sister.
Emily had shaken free.

A soul can do that.
Whether it goes to join Thou and sit on the porch for all eternity
enjoying jokes and kisses and beautiful cold spring evenings,

you and I will never know. But I can tell you what I saw.
Nude #13 arrived when I was not watching for it.
It came at night.

Very much like Nude #1.
And yet utterly different.
I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,
but as I came closer
I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind

was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“In the cracks of the prison, something blossomed. A field of wildflowers imposed on the night sky. Blood was coming. Joy and dread mingled there, infusing the air with a powerful sense of rapture and uncertainty.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“Little rackety wind went by. / Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep. Somewhere (he thought) beneath / this strip of sleeping pavement / the enormous solid globe is spinning on its way—pistons thumping, lava pouring / from shelf to shelf, / evidence and time lignifying into their traces.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red