Catachresis

…if the humanities specifically and higher education in general are to renew their public commitments to global democracy they must offer students the knowledge and technological tools to develop multiple forms of literacy and be skilled not just as critical readers of texts but also as cultural producers able to use the new technologies to provide alternatives to the deadening silences and misrepresentations produced through official channels of communication both within and outside of higher education.

—Henry Giroux, “Democracy’s Nemesis: The Rise of the Corporate University.”
in Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, 2009

Far from being exclusively about matters of representation and texts, culture becomes a site, an event, and a performance in which identities and modes of agency are configured through the mutually determined forces of thought and action, body and mind, and time and space. Culture is the public space where common matters, shared solidarities, and public engagements provide the fundamental elements of democracy.

—Henry Giroux, “Public pedagogy and the politics of neo-liberalism: making the political more pedagogical.”
in Policy Futures in Education nos. 3 & 4, 2004

I’m a soldier on my own.

“Iron” — Woodkid

Utopias seek to emancipate by envisioning a world based on new, neglected, or spurned ideas; dystopias seek to frighten by accentuating contemporary trends that threaten freedom.

—Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age.
Columbia University Press, 2005

So many rocked and so much opinion, so much shit to give into.

“Hot Topic” - Le Tigre

You change a game by leaving it, going somewhere else and starting a new game. If it works, it will in time alter or replace the old game.

—Stewart Brand, “Theory of Game Change”
in The New Games Book, 1976

To the folks on the picket lines: don’t stop till you change their minds.

“Soldier” - Erykah Badu

The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic. On the contrary: such reflection becomes necessary precisely for this reason. To take the culture industry as seriously as its unquestioned role demands, means to take it seriously critically, and not to cower in the face of its monopolistic character.

—Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”
in The Culture Industry, Routledge, 1991

Get along, for awhile, citizen, you’ll see, how the innocent are bound to the damned.

“Citizen” - Broken Bells

Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

—Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”
in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge, 1991