Artistic autonomy was traditionally predicated not on occupation, but on separation — more precisely, on art’s separation from life. As artistic production became more specialized in an industrial world marked by an increasing division of labor, it also grew increasingly divorced from direct functionality. While it apparently evaded instrumentalization, it simultaneously lost social relevance. As a reaction, different avant-gardes set out to break the barriers of art and to recreate its relation to life. Their hope was for art to dissolve within life, to be infused with a revolutionary jolt. What happened as rather the contrary.
To push the point: life has been occupied by art, because art’s initial forays back into life and daily practice gradually turned into routine incursions, and then into constant occupation. Nowadays, the invasion of life by art is not the exception, but the rule. Artistic autonomy was meant to separate art from the zone of daily routine — from mundane life, intentionality, utility, production, and instrumental reason — in order to distance it from rules of efficiency and social coercion. But this incompletely segregated area then incorporated all that it broke from in the first place, recasting the old order within its own aesthetic paradigms. The incorporation of art within life was once a political project (both for the Left and Right), but the incorporation of life within art is now an aesthetic project, and it coincides with an overall aestheticization of politics.
Black women can never rest and so we die early.
If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.
The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. — bell hooks d. 2021
A life in quotes: bell hooks
The groundbreaking feminist critic, poet, and intellectual on love, feminism, patriarchy, white supremacy, forgiveness and the power of art
bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69
Bell hooks, the feminist author, poet, theorist and cultural critic, has died at the age of 69 at her home in Berea, Kentucky. Her works, including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, All About Love, Bone Black, Feminist Theory and Communion: The Female Search for Love, were beacons for a generation of writers and thinkers in academia and beyond.
Here’s a handful of her most memorable quotes: — The Guardian - Books - bell hooks
“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. — Joan Didion d. 2021
Her second essay collection, The White Album (1979) contained her most famous line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
“For me, writing is a kind of exploration,” Didion told the Guardian in 2003. “I’m not sure that I have a social conscience. It’s more an insistence that people tell the truth.” — Guardian - Joan Didion
What I want and what I fear. — 180 Proof
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
There is nothing more difficult than waking someone who is only pretending to be asleep.
Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.
When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.
Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.
Ubuntu [...] speaks of the very essence of being human. [We] say [...] "Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu." Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person through other persons."
We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are.
We are made for loving. If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water. — Desmond Tutu, d. 2021
You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. — E.O. Wilson, d. 2021
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