thinks is learning to resist

Where can we situate, in our present, a “cause” capable of resisting the accusation of compromise and able to teach us to resist, along with it; a cause that we can acknowledge to be free of complicity, having resisted not through some historical contingency predicated on “not yet”, but through its own resources, the dynamics of capitalist redefinition? If learning to think is learning to resist a future that presents itself as obvious, plausible, and normal, we cannot do so either by evoking an abstract future, from which everything subject to our disapproval has been swept aside, or by referring to a distant cause that we should inagine to be free of any compromise. To resist a likely future in the present is to gamble that the present still provides substance for resistance, that it is populated by practices that remain vital even if none of them has escaped the generalized parasitism that implicates then all.

Stengers, I(2010) Cosmopolitics I, University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. p. 09-10

the ineffable

"Loss is inevitable in the story of each person. Losing your wallet, losing your job, losing your home, your family, your city—the degree of loss escalates from the inconvenient to the inconceivable, and with it the experience of the ineffable. Loss, however, is necessary in order for us to change, not only in our habits, but also in our understandings and beliefs. As long as we cling comfortably to what we are and know, we cannot learn, or create. If design is to be a creative act, it must take on the most difficult situations in our lives. It must offer more than comfort and reassurance. It must confront the unspeakable—the ineffable—and become a means by which we can transcend it. This means that we—as individuals and as architects—must, as the Existentialist poet Nikos Kazantzakis once put it, “build the affirmative structure of our lives over an abyss of nothingness.” A heroic—probably too heroic—task, it is true. Except for those who have no choice."

Lebbeus Woods

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans*

*Woody Allen

"AT A DECISIVE MOMENT in the film The Dark Knight, when Harvey Dent transforms into chance-obsessed Two Face, the Joker, clad in a nurse’s uniform, looms above the maimed politician’s hospital bed. “Do I really look like a guy with a plan, Harvey?” he asks. “I don’t have a plan. The Mob has plans, the cops have plans.” He continues, reflecting on the plans at work all around them: You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. I just dothings. I’m just the wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans: schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer; I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are."

Nathan Schneider, Divine Wilderness. In triplecanopy

[Image: From The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan, courtesy of Warner Brothers].