#kamworkshops2011 | Hardt & Negri, Empire (2000), p.32

“The most complete figure of this world is presented from the monetary perspective. From here we can see a horizon of values and a machine of distribution, a mechanism of accumulation and a means of circulation, a power and a language. There is nothing, no ‘‘naked life,’’ no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money; nothing escapes money. Production and reproduction are dressed in monetary clothing. In fact, on the global stage, every biopolitical figure appears dressed in monetary garb. ‘‘Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!’”

#kamworkshops2011 | by Ilia Kabakov, 1977:

“An enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials and sacks; all forms of packaging which were ever needed by man have not lost their shape, they did not become something dead when they were discarded. They cry out about a past life, they preserve it…

It’s hard to say what kind of image this is… maybe an image of some sort of camp when everything is doomed to perish but still struggles to live; maybe its an image of a certain civilization slowly sinking under the pressure of unknown cataclysms, but in which nevertheless some sort of events are taking place. The feeling of vast, cosmic existence ecnompasses a person at these dumps…

…But stiil why does the dump and its image summon my imagination over and over again, why do I always return to it? Because I feel that man, living in our region, is simply suffocating in his own life among the garbage since there is nowhere to take it, nowhere to sweep it out - we have lost the border between garbage and non-garbage space. Everything is covered up, littered with garbage - our homes, streets, cities. We have no place to discard all this - it remains near us.”

#kamworkshops2011 | zombie-theories

[…] let us ask a naïve question: why do the dead return? The answer offered by Lacan is the same as found in the popular culture: because they were not properly buried, i.e., because something went wrong with obsequies. The return of the dead is a sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization, the dead return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt. […] The return of the living dead, then, materializes a certain symbolic debt persisting beyond physical expiration.

It is commonplace to state that symbolization as such equates to symbolic murder: when we speak about a thing, we suspend, place in parentheses, its reality. It is precisely for that reason that the funeral rite exemplifies symbolization at its purest: through it, the dead are inscribed in the text of symbolic tradition, they that, in spite of their death, they will “continue to live” in the memory of the community. The “return of the living dead” is, on the other hand, the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition. (p. 23)

Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991

(Source: books.google.com)

#kamworkshops2011 | Garbage Cities: Italo Calvino’s Leonia from the book Invisible Cities.

(Source: ruanyifeng.com)

#kamworkshops2011 | Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, Sage, 1998), p. 43-45

 Waste

We know how much the affluence of rich societies is linked to waste, given all the talk of a `throwaway society’ and the fact that some have even envisaged a `garbage-can sociology’: `Tell me what you throw away and I’ll tell you who you are!’ But the statistics of waste and rubbish are not interesting in themselves: they are merely a redundant marker of the volume of goods on offer, and their profusion. We can understand neither waste nor its functions if we see in it only the residual scraps of what is made to be consumed but is not. Once again, we have here a simplistic definition of consumption — a moral definition based on the imperative utility of goods. So, all our moralists rail against the squandering of wealth — from the actions of the private individual who no longer respects that kind of moral law internal to the object which its use-value is taken to be and the object’s time- span (the individual who throws his goods away or changes them to comply with the whims of prestige or fashion, etc.) to waste on the national and international scale — and even on a kind of global scale, where the human race is seen as squandering wealth in its general economy and its exploitation of natural resources. In short, waste is always considered a kind of madness, of insanity, of instinctual dysfunction, which causes man to burn his reserves and compromise his survival conditions by irrational practice […]

(Source: books.google.com)

on Destruction | #kamworkshops2011 in Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, Sage, 1998), p. 49

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