Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 53

Maleness and femaleness are not biological givens, but rather the results of a long historical process. In each historic epoch maleness and femaleness are differently defined. This definition depends on the principal mode of production in these epochs. This means the organic differences between women and men are differently interpreted and valued, according to the dominant form of appropriation of natural matter for the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore, throughout history, men and women have developed a qualitatively different relationship to their own bodies. In matristic societies femaleness was interpreted as the social paradigm of all productivity, as the main active principle in the production of life. All women were defined as 'mothers'. But 'mothers' meant something other than it does today. Under capitalist conditions all women are socially defined as housewives (all men as breadwinners), and motherhood has become part and parcel of this housewife syndrome. The distinction between the earlier, matristic definition of femaleness and the modern one is that the modern definition has been emptied of all active, creative (subjective), productive (that is, human) qualities.

Shirley Jackson, The Sundial pages 165-166

"Well, I just don't get it myself." Fancy thought, and gestured at the garden which lay before them. "Look," she said, "don't any of you just plain like things? Always worrying about the world? Look. Aunt Fanny keeps saying that there is going to be a lovely world, all green and still and perfect and we are all going to live there and be peaceful and happy. That would be perfectly fine for me, except right here I live in a lovely world, all green and still and perfect, even though no one around here seems to be very peaceful or happy, but when I think about it this new world is going to have Aunt Fanny and my grandmother and you and Essex and the rest of these crazy people and my mother and what makes anyone think you're going to be more happy or peaceful just because you're the only ones left?"

"That's because you're not very grown up yet," Gloria said, sedately. "When you get older you'll understand."

"Will I?" asked Fanny innocently. "Right now I'm not allowed to play with the children in the village because my grandmother says we are too good a family for me to play with the children in the village and so later on I won't be allowed to play with the children in the village because there won't be any village, and we'll certainly be too good a family because we'll be the only family. And what will there be left for me to understand when I grow up?"

"You make it all sound foolish. Fancy, tell me. What is going to happen? Do you know?"

"Well," Fancy said slowly, "you all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different. But I don't suppose people get changed any by just a new world. And anyway that world isn't any more real than this one."

"It is, though. You forget that I saw it in the mirror."

"Maybe you'll get onto the other side of that mirror in the new clean world. Maybe you'll look through from the other side and see this world again and go around crying that you wish some big thing would happen and wipe out that one and send you back here. Like I keep trying to tell you, it doesn't matter which world you're in."

"Essex--"

"I'm sick and tired of Essex." Fancy tumbled off the bench and rolled like a puppy in the grass. "You want to come and play with my dollhouse?"

Samuel Beckett, Watt page 44

But in what did the change consist? What was changed, and how? What was changed, if my information is correct, was the sentiment that a change, other than a change of degree, had taken place.

Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? page 153

This is more like the kind of play we are used to. Not just because seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatists and opera librettists turned more often to Euripides than to the other two, but because it's more like the kind of drama we see coming out of Hollywood and on our television screens every night. How exactly does it differ from Aeschylus and Sophocles? First of all, there is no longer any need for the mask. Indeed, masking is a positive hindrance, since so much in these plays turns on the contrast between appearance and reality, or on the nuances of doubt and uncertainty. [John] Jones puts it this way: Sophoclean privacy has been replaced by Euripidean inwardness, which gives us our modern category of the subjective. 'When Orestes saw the Furies in the Oresteia', he says, 'he was not experiencing an hallucination: he was polluted. But when the Euripidean Orestes thought he saw the Furies (Orestes, 408), he knew that his guilty 'conscience' (396) lay at the back of the apparition. At the same time Euripides' new interest in human beings and his new fascination with plot brings with it a failing confidence in praxis, action. This is what Kierkegaard was after when he said: 'In ancient tragedy the action itself has an epic moment in it; it is as much event as action.' What he meant was that in the Agamemnon or the Oedipus at Colonus we witness essentially a single event: the return home and murder of Agamemnon; the arrival at Colonus and going to his death of Oedipus. It unfolds slowly before us, each moment having the same weight as every other; when the event has been explored from all sides, as it were, the play is over, leaving us with that double experience of pity and sorrow, calmness and joy, which Kierkegaard and Jones explore so well. In Iphegeneia in Tauris, on the other hand, as in most of Euripides, as in the modern drama against which Jarry, Brecht, Beckett and Ionesco were reacting, we witness the author's manipulation of plot to create exciting theatre, driving towards its (surprising and often unexpected) conclusion. 'Clearly defined terminal climax, so impressively absent in the older drama', concludes Jones, 'becomes a felt need in Euripides.'

Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? pages 145-146

...one of the key essays in Either/Or is the essay, in Part I, entitled 'The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern', in which he seeks to bring out the essential difference between ancient and modern tragedy. Our age is more melancholy than that of the Greeks, and so more in despair, says Kierkegaard. The reason for this is that today each person is deemed to be entirely responsible for his actions while 'the peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not issue exclusively from character, that the action does not find its sufficient explanation in subjective reflection and decision'. We can see this in the very form of ancient and of modern tragedy. Modern tragedy, like all modern drama, proceeds by means of dialogue; in ancient Greek drama dialogue formed only one component of the play, alongside monlogue and, above all, the chorus. 'The chorus', says Kierkegaard, 'indicates...the more which will not be absorbed in individuality.' (And this, incidentally, explains why opera, as Kierkegaard demonstrates in the previous essay in the volume, on Mozart's Don Giovanni, can say so much more than drama--music, in opera, has taken over the role of the chorus in ancient Greek drama.)

What is this 'more'? Why does it define ancient tragedy? And why is it absent from its modern counterpart?

The reason for this naturally lies in the fact that the ancient world did not have subjectivity fully self-conscious and reflective. Even if the individual moved freely, he still rested in the substantial categories of state, family and destiny. This substantial category is exactly the fatalistic element in Greek tragedy, and its exact peculiarity. The hero's destruction is, therefore, not only the result of his own deeds, but it is also, suffering, whereas in modern tragedy, the hero's destruction is really not suffering, but is action.

The hero of Greek tragedy was not an autonomous individual. He was caught in and made by a whole web of different interpenetrating elements. These were what led to tragedy but also what absolved him from full responsibility. Terrible things might happen to him, but he could not blame himself, or, to put it in terms of Greek tragedy itself, he might be polluted but he was not guilty. In modern tragedy, on the other hand, 'the hero stands and falls entirely on his own acts'. 'Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state and race. It must leave the individual entirely to himself, so that in a stricter sense he becomes his own creator, his guilt is consequently sin, his pain remorse; but this nullifies the tragic.' For the Greeks, 'life relationships are once and for all assigned to them, like the heaven under which they live. If this is dark and cloudy, it is also unchangeable.' And, argues Kierkegaard, this is what gives Greek tragedy its soothing quality....Tragedy leads to sorrow, ethics to pain. 'Where the age loses the tragic', he concludes, 'it gains despair.'

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 169

What fears instigated such concerted policy of genocide? Why was so much violence unleashed? And why were its primary targets women?...

It must be immediately stated that, to this day, there are no sure answers to these questions. A major obstacle in the way of an explanation has been the fact that the charges against the witches are so grotesque and unbelievable as to be incommensurable with any motivation or crime.¹² How to account for the fact that for more than two centuries, in several European countries, hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, burned alive or hanged, accused of having sold body and soul to the devil and, by magical means, murdered scores of children, sucked their blood, made potions with their flesh, caused the death of their neighbors, destroyed cattle and crops, raised storms, and performed many other abominations? (However, even today, some historians ask us to believe that the witch-hunt was quite reasonable in the context of the contemporary belief structure!)

12. There is also evidence of significant shifts in the weight attributed to specific accusations, the nature of the crimes commonly associated with witchcraft, and the social composition of the accusers and accused. The most significant shift, perhaps, is that in an early phase of the persecution (during the 15th-century trials) witchcraft was seen predominantly as a collective crime, relying on mass gatherings and organization, while by the 17th century it was seen as a crime of an individual nature, an evil career in which isolated witches specialized--this being a sign of the breakdown of communal bonds brought about by the increasing privatization of land tenure and the expansion of commercial relations in this period.

[Endnote on page 211]

Robert Sheckley, Journey Beyond Tomorrow (in the Dimensions of Sheckley Omnibus) page 163

Joenes said, "I stand upon my Constitutional rights, namely the First and Fifth Amendments, and respectfully decline to answer."

Pelops smiled thinly. "You may not do so, Mr. Joenes, since the Constitution to which you now so fervently cling has been reinterpreted, or rather brought up to date, by those of us who wish to preserve it from change and desecration. The Amendments you mention, Mr. Joenes--or should I say Comrade Joenes--will not permit you to be silent for reasons which any judge of the Supreme Court would have been glad to tell you--had you chosen to ask him!"

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance page 887

People often ask me what sort of a culture I would like to see replace civilization, and I always say that I do not want any culture to replace this one. I want 100,000 cultures to replace it, each one emerging from its own landbase, each one doing what sustainable cultures of all times and all places have done for their landbases: helping the landbase to become stronger, more itself, through their presence.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State page 332

It is worth emphasizing the degree to which oral cultures, as opposed to written cultures, may avoid the rigidity of orthodoxy. Because an oral culture has no textual reference point for marking deviations, traditions currently in circulation vary with the speaker, the audience, and local needs. Having no yardstick like a sacred text to measure the degree of drift from its Ur-tradition, such a culture can change greatly over time and simultaneously think of itself as remaining faithful to tradition.

José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies page 292

...they call it peace to live in so many and so terrible evils, such as sacrificing their own children or making other hidden sacrifices, or staying awake all night doing mad things; and so they neither maintain cleanliness in their lives or in their marriages, but one man takes the life of another out of envy, another takes a man's wife and he has no objection, and everything is confused: blood, deaths, thefts, deceits, corruption, unfaithfulness, riots, wrongs, mutinies, forgetfulness of God, contamination of souls, changing sexes and birth, changing of marriage partners, and disorder of adulteries and filthiness, for idolatry is an abyss of all the evils.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pages 42-43

Arthur let out a low groan. He was horrified to discover that the kick through hyperspace hadn't killed him. He was now six light-years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still existed.

The Earth.

Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab--the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, was gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.

He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren page 24

Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanics. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz page 128

When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.