Creativity and desire
– what we often reduce, in political economy terms, to 'production' and 'consumption' – are essentially vehicles of the imagination...The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently...
Imagination [is] the zone of passage between reality and reason..."
David GraeberWhen truth cannot be realized within the established social order, it always appears to the latter as mere utopia.' [Marcuse 1937]...
When I called the utopian the exile of our longing for nonsacrificial freedoms and exuberant unforeseen pleasures, I treated those desires as if they had no home, as if they were always destined to be extradited to some elusive place where exiled longings live.
The utopian is its own mode or form and it exists as more than a haunt. It exists in all those examples of the things we are and do that exceed or are just not expressions of what's dominant and dominating us.
It exists when the utopian is not the future as some absolute break from the past and the present, but a way of living in the here and now.
The utopian is not only the exile of our longing for nonsacrificial freedoms. It is...the ongoing building of an alternative civilization, with its own reason, its own home, and its own system of value. [2004]
Avery GordonThe utopian is its own mode or form and it exists as more than a haunt. It exists in all those examples of the things we are and do that exceed or are just not expressions of what's dominant and dominating us.
It exists when the utopian is not the future as some absolute break from the past and the present, but a way of living in the here and now.
The utopian is not only the exile of our longing for nonsacrificial freedoms. It is...the ongoing building of an alternative civilization, with its own reason, its own home, and its own system of value. [2004]
The method here
is everything and nothing much really...to consider a different way of seeing, one that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link imagination and critique...the difference it makes to start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or, more commonly, with what we never even notice...modernity's violence and wounds...our own stolen heterodoxy and will to dissent. [1997]
Avery GordonYou have to believe
your body can do anything.
Pablo Villarraza
True communication
only exists in a matrix of trust, faith, love, and hope.
Karl Jaspers
When you walk to the edge
of all the light you know and step into the darkness, one of two things will happen: You will find firm ground under your feet or you will learn to fly.
Patrick Overton
Community
makes self-esteem possible, by convincing the individual he is a valuable contributor to a context of meaningful action.
Ernest Becker
Joy
is the feeling of your powers expanding.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Social movements' primary function
is to introduce new ideas –cosmologies– to their societies.
Ron Eyerman, Andrew Jamison
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