Ganesh Haloi
Untitled
1996

The capitalist is a conqueror and the conqueror is a monster, a centaur: its forequarters are nourished by the reproduction of regulated systems of metamorphoses controlled under the law of the commodity standard, and its hindquarters by looting overexcited energies. With one hand he appropriates, therefore retains, that is to say reproduces within equivalence, reinvests; with the other, he takes and destroys, steals and flees, hollowing out another space, another time. Capitalism’s crises as Marx understood them always come from a disarticulation between time of conquest and the time of reproduction. The function of cybernetics is to avoid these crises by ensuring the coordination between the “forequarters” and “hindquarters” of Capital. Its development is an endogenous response given to the problem posed by capitalism, which is to develop without fatal disequilibria.

Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis

Edward Krasinski
Intervention 27
1975

Paul Klee
Flagged Pavilion
1927

Genres provide an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art. The waning of genre frames different kinds of potential openings within and beyond the impasse of adjustment that constant crisis creates. [...] In the present from which I am writing about the present, conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicitness affectively and aesthetically. Cinema and other recording forms not only archive what is being lost but track what happens in the time that we inhabit before new forms make it possible to relocate within conventions the fantasy of sovereign life unfolding from actions.

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

Otto Wagner
Österreichische Postsparkasse
1904-12

"Graphical addition of single-valued scalar fields." Dynamic meteorology and hydrography, 1910.

Every juridical system is in some way a crystallization of a specific set of values, because ethics is part of the materiality of every juridical foundation, but Empire—and in particular the Roman tradition of imperial right—is peculiar in that it pushes the coincidence and universality of the ethical and the juridical to the extreme: in Empire there is peace, in Empire there is the guarantee of justice for all peoples. The concept of Empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths. And in order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, ‘‘just wars’’ at the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire