“is the equivalence between an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything – feelings along with consumer goods, language along with built space – that would seem incompatible with such mutability… What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been as standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogenously. … What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.”

— Frederic Jameson, The Antinomies of Postmodernism

Musik ist Dämmerung.

— Richard Wagner

An enigma, like a riddle is proposed to the subject by another subject. But the solution of a riddle in theory is theoretically completely in the conscious possession of the one who poses it, and thus, it is entirely resolved by the answer. An enigma, on the contrary, can only be proposed by someone who does not master the answer, because his message is a compromise-formation in which his unconsciousness takes part.

— Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

— Shakespeare, Tempest

On the face of it death, coldly, methodically, dealt out by a firing squad, precludes an indifferent treatment; such a subject is nothing if not charged with meaning for each one of us. But Manet approaches it with an almost callous indifference that the spectator, surprisingly enough, shares to the full. Maximilian reminds us of a tooth deadened by novocain…. Manet posed some of his models in the attitude of dying, some in the attitude of killing, but all more or less casually, as if they were about to “buy a bunch of radishes.'”

— Bataille on “L’execution de l’empereur Maximilien. 1868/69

Be Quiet
Be Quiet
Be Quiet

Eventually, I stopped understanding how photography works.