Author: Lars Iyer

This is the neoliberal period of capital in all its fetid glory: the ruthles marketization of everything existing – including itself, in the sense that the marketization is itself marketed as, among other things, 'natural', 'fair', 'win-win', 'progress', and other empty signifiers. […]

Neoliberalism triumphant presents us with the more frightening specter of what I am calling educational eliminationism, by which I mean a state of affairs in which elites no longer find it necessary to utlize mass schooling as a first link in the long chain of the process of the extraction of workers' surplus labour value. It has instead become easier for them to cut their losses and abandon public schooling altogether. Any remaining commitments are purely vestigal and ahve more to do with social stability rather than with education proper, as vast swathes of our school system (particularly in urban areas) are decisively repurposed as holding facilities for (putative) proto-criminals, lost within what Henry Giroux decries as a 'youth crime-control complex', with a special layer of legal menace for urban kids in what Michelle Alexander pointedly calls 'the new Jim Crow'. […]

It should now be clear to everyone that neoliberal education policy is not about reforming public schools. It is about obliterating any remaining vestiges of the public square via a market discipline that is officially supposed to apply to everyone but in reality is selectively applied only to those lacking sufficient wealth to commandeer state policy; ironically the sacred market applies to public schools not to megabanks. It is in essence the strategy of the gated community, where those at the top 'have theirs' and withdraw from the educational commons and into their state-backed corporatist enclaves. Our elite capitains are abandoning the public educational ship in whose hold lie nearly 90% of US school children. […]

The newer kind of non-recognition involves not merely reducing people to means but simply wishing them away and ignoring them altogether; in this way at the level of the concern for the Other, we are transforming from abuse to neglect. An increasing proportion of humanity – in the global South but also here at home – grows non-exploitable economically. Their labour is incapable of importing enough value to render them serviceable for traditional capitalist production and so they are economically 'out of the loop'[…] They have become 'extra people' and superfluous. At best their realtion to the formal economy is occasional and precarious as evidence by the stunning growth of those living most of their lives in what anthropologist Keith Hart desceribes as 'the informal economy', living, for example, under subsistence conditions of 'forced entrepreneurship' such as prostitution or the selling of odds and ends. They are the disposable ones[…] Their main productive function now is to serve as part of a disciplinary warning to precarious remaining workers that 'but for the grace of the (job)Creator, there go I'. […]

From a wider lens, what is actually occurring is that monopolistic neoliberal elites are asserting their grip more strongly by more directly harnessing all social institutions as adjuncts for their ever-more desperate drive to accumulate capital[…] the end result is […] a flattening-out and homogenising of the range of what human beings value, where every activity is to be translated into the language of only one would-be totalizing sphere. This in the end is the neoliberal leviathan in all its monomaniacal glory. It seeks only itself, a monomaniacal sameness, ultimately offering the existentially terrifying boredom of absolute self-identity. […]

Who are the these rugged competitive heroes who live by the global free market alone? Who actually embraces this?  It is manifestly not today's capitalist class, who by now by and large enjoy secure monopoly positions from which they can watch at a distance the little people tear each other apart as gladiatorial economic sport. 

David J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame

What I suffer from this continuous idleness I am quite unable to describe. I would like most to hang myself on the nearest branch of the cheery trees standing now in full bloom. This wonderful spring with its secret life and movement troubles me unspeakably. These eternal blue skies, lasting for weeks, this continuous sprouting and budding in nature, these coaxing breezes impregnated with spring sunlight and fragrances of flowers … make me frantic. Everywhere this bewildering urge for life, fruitfulness, creation – and only I, although like the humblest grass of the fields of one of God’s creatures, may not take part in this festival of resurrection, at any rate not except as a spectator with grief and envy.

Hugo Wolf

There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything. I stay because I am too weak to go. I crawl on because it is easier than to stop. I put my face to the window. There is nothing out there but the blackness and the sound of rain. Neither when I shut my eyes can I see anything. I am alone…. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.

Edward Thomas

But it is always a question of whether I wish to avoid these glooms…. These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters; which is a little alarming, but full of interest…. There is an edge to it which I feel is of great importance…. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.

Virginia Woolf

The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, by so much more am I an artist – a creative artist… this green shoot springing from the roots of an old felled trunk, these are such abstract things that a kind of melancholy remains within us when we think that one could have created life at less cost than creating art

Van Gogh

I am so ill – so terribly, hopelessly ILL in body and mind, that I feel I CANNOT live … until I subdue this fearful agitation, which if continued, will either destroy my life, or, drive me hopelessly mad.

Edgar Allan Poe

I roll on like a ball, with this exception, that contrary to the usual laws of motion I have no friction to content with in my mind, and of course have some difficulty in stopping myself when there is nothing else to stop me…. I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head – trains of thought beginning and branching to infinity, crossing each other, and all tempting and wanting to be worked out.

John Ruskin

She talked almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her. For about a day what she said was coherent; the sentences meant something, though it was nearly all wildly insane. Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words.

Leonard Woolf on Virginia

… despite antennae exceedingly alert to the changing 'spirit of the age', I apprehended too late certain key shifts. Aware, early on, of the widening authority of the mathematical and experimental sciences, intensely involved in the 'language-revolution' and the coming of the new media of meaning, I none the less did not identify rigorously the underlying tectonic drift. Educated in a hypertrophied reverence for the classics, in that near-worship of the 'titans' of thought, music, literature and the arts, so characteristic of emancipated central European Judaism, I felt committed to the canonic, the confirmed and the 'immortal' (those immortels mummified in the French Academy!). It took too long before I understood that the ephemeral, the fragmentary, the derisive, the self-ironising are the key modes of modernity; before I realised that the interactions between high and popular culture, notably via the film and television – now the commanding instruments of general sensibility and, it may be, of invention – had largely replaced the monumental pantheon. Influential as they are, deconstruction and postmodernism are themselves only symptoms, bright bubbles at the surface of a much deeper mutation. It is, as I have suggested, of the related classical impulse in art and poetry to endure, to achieve timelessness which are, today, in radical question. It is the transformation of these ontological-historical categories, in Kant's sense of the word, it is the ebbing of ideals and performative hierarchies instrumental since the pre-Socratics, which define what I have called 'the epilogue' but which others acclaim as 'the new age'. There is too much I have grasped too late in the day. Too often my activity as a writer and teacher, as a critic and scholar, has been, consciously or not, an in memoriam, a curatorship of remembrance. But could it be otherwise after the Shoah.

George Steiner, Errata

If I were to resume in a single phrase the difference between messianic time and apocalyptic time, I would say that the messianic is not the end of time but the time of the end. What is messianic is not the end of time but the relation of every moment, every kairos, to the end of time and to eternity.

[…] In the Judaic tradition there is a distinction between two times and two worlds: the olam hazzeh, the time stretching from the creation of the world to its end, and the olam habba, the time that begins after the end of time. Both terms are present, in their Greek translations, in Paul’s Letters. Messianic time, however – the time in which the apostle lives and the only one that interests him – is neither that of the olam hazzeh nor that of the olam habba. It is, instead, the time between those two times, when time is divided by the messianic event (which is for Paul the Resurrection).

… what is at issue is a time that pulses and moves within chronological time, that transforms chronological time from within. On the one hand it is the time that time takes to end. But on the other hand it is the time that remains, the time which we need to end time, to confront our customary image of time and to liberate ourselves from it. In the one case, the time in which we believe we live separates us from what we are and transforms us into powerless spectators of our own lives. In the other case, however, the time of the messiah is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we grasp time, we grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but that time. This time is not some other time located in an improbably present or future time. On the contrary, it is the only real time, the only time we will ever have. 

Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom

Once, the poet knew how to account for his poetry (‘To open it through prose’, as Dante puts it), and the critic was also a poet. Now, the critic has lost access to the work of creation and thus gets revenge by presuming to judge it, while the poet no longer knows how to save his own work and thus discounts this incapacity by blindly consigning himself to the frivolity of an angel. 

Agamben, Nudities

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.

Agamben, State of Exception

What had happened [with the appearance of consciousness – LI]? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged weapon cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his votal processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.

Peter Zappfe, from 'The Last Messiah'