Tag: quotes

Suppose it is granted that a plongeur’s* work is more or less useless. Then the question follows, why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people–comfortably situated people–do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good–for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery…

…I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be too dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933

*a plongeur is an employee of a restaurant charged with washing dishes and other tasks; in Orwell’s book it is described as extremely arduous work.

Battlefield terms such as strongpoint, advance, penetration, encirclement, envelopment, surveillance, control and supply lines migrated from the military to the civilian sphere… In the hands of Sharon, his followers and colleagues, architecture and planning were presented as a continuation of war by other means. The civilianization of military terms was to lead in turn to the militarization of all other spheres of life. War was only over because it was now everywhere.

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, 2008.

Violence is required to achieve the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian impoverished quarters, using powers of expropriation for supposedly public benefit, and did so in the name of civic improvement, environmental restoration, and urban renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements, along with insalubrious industries, from Paris’ city center, where they constituted a threat to public order, public health and, of course, political power. He created an urban form where it was believed (incorrectly, as it turned out, in 1871) sufficient levels of surveillance and military control were possible so as to ensure that revolutionary movements could easily be controlled by military power.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities, 2012.

The city is man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.

Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior, 1967.

Soul of all souls, life of all life–you are That.

Seen and unseen, moving and unmoving–you are That.

The road that leads to the City is endless;

Go without head or feet

and you’ll already be there.

What else could you be?–you are That.

                                                    -Rumi

To the extent that the global status system is de-temporalized, or re-temporalized in nonprogressive ways, the nature of the relation between global rich and poor is transformed. For in a world of non-serialized political economic statuses, the key questions are no longer temporal ones of societal becoming (development, modernization), but spatialized ones of guarding the edges of a status group—hence, the new prominence of walls, borders, and processes of social exclusion in an era that likes to imagine itself as characterized by an ever expanding connection and communication.

James Ferguson, “Decomposing modernity: History and Hierarchy After Development” in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, 2007.

Le livre est ainsi: une maison où chaque fenêtre est un quartier, chaque porte une ville, chaque page est une rue; c’est une maison d’apparence, un décor de théâtre où on fait la lune avec un drap bleu pendu entre deux fenêtres et une ampoule allumée.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’Enfant de sable, 1985

[A book is like that: a house where each window is a quartier, each door a town, each page a street. It is a pretend house, a theatrical set where the moon is achieved with a light bulb and a blue sheet held between two windows.]

“He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occured precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. it had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a t-shirt once said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.”

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, 2008