Ivan Illich on Irrational Consistencies

From Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971):

"Irrational consistency mesmerizes accomplices who are engaged in mutually expedient and disciplined exploitation. It is the logic generated by bureaucratic behavior. And it becomes the logic of a society which demands that the managers of its educational institutions be held publicly accountable for the behavioral modification they produce in their clients."

Kieslowski on America

From director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Kieslowski on Kieslowski. A cartesian meditation on American cities and highways:

"I'm afraid of America. Whenever I'm in New York I always have the feeling it's going to cave in and all I can think about is how to avoid being there when that happens. The same goes for other places in America. You don't get all those people and all that noise in the streets of California as you do in New York but, in turn, there's a huge number of cars going to and fro and I always have serious doubts as to whether there are any Americans inside. You know, who's inside? I've always got the impression that those cars drive themselves... ."

Cage on Life Without Art

From David Revill's revelatory Cage biography, The Roaring Silence:

"I can imagine a world without art, and it would not be a bad place. If there were a part of life dark enough to keep out of it a light from art, I would want to be in that darkness, fumbling around if necessary, but alive."

John Cage

Cyberspace Cowboys

From Democracy Inc.--Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism: "Outer space was soon overshadowed by the discovery of "cyberspace," the domain where [Jackson] Turner's fromtier thesis took on new meaning as its champions proclaimed that democracy had been reinvented. A band of young pioneers, personified in Bill Gates, explored and exploited a hitherto unknown world where physical power was irrelevant. The new frontiersmen were enterprising in the extreme, hypercompetitive, ruthless in their methods ("take no prisoners"), and able to create staggering amounts of wealth in a relatively brief time. Above all they invented forms of technology that appeared to have the potential for endless innovation: Turner's utopia, a frontier land that, like the universe, appeared to have no borders. Predictably, the introduction of the Internet was hailed as the perfect expression of democracy: that everyone could enter the Web and voice whatever happened to be on his or her mind=democracy.

Thomas Merton on Poetry

Thomas Merton invokes "the solidarity of poets" as a defense of the innocence of wonder and of art. From Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable.

"The Solidarity of poets is not planned and welded together with tactical convictions or matters of policy, since these are affairs of prejudice, cunning, and design. Whatever his failures, the poet is not a cunning man. His art depends on an ingrained innocence which he would lose in business, in politics, or in too organized a form of academic life. The hope that rests on calculation has lost its innocence. We are banding together to defend our innocence."

Ionesco via Merton

"In all the cities of the world, it is the same... The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots."

Eugene Ionesco, as quoted in Thomas Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable

Jacques Ellul on Information

A prescient passage from Jacques Ellul's Propaganda (1965)

A surfeit of data, far from permitting people to make judgments and form opinions, prevents them from doing so and actually paralyzes them. They are caught in a web of facts and must remain at the level of the facts they have been given. They cannot even make a choice or a judgment in other areas or on other subjects. Thus the mechanisms of modern information induce a sort of hypnosis in the individual, who cannot get out of the field laid out for him by the information. His opinion will ultimately be formed solely on the basis of the facts transmitted to him, and not on the basis of his choice and his personal experience. The more techniques of distributing information develop, the more the individual is shaped by such information. It is not true that he can choose freely with regard to what is presented to him as the truth. And because rational propaganda thus creates an irrational situation, it remains, above all, propaganda-- that is, an inner control over the individual by a social force, which means that it deprives him of himself.