A favorite line from McLuhan:

Nobody can commit photography alone.

In the pasture behind my home there are still traces of how people used to live on my place. Just a ways down a creek full of cattails and reeds, an old farmhouse, faded gray and falling down, stands near a small pond and a dying tree. Beside it, barely visible through the growing grass, are the foundations of other buildings--a granary, a blacksmith's shed, a woodshed, and perhaps a barn. Farther away, a line of rhubarb plants still struggles against the prairie grass, probably near what used to be a garden. Farther away still there is a shelter belt of aged and slowly dying cottonwood trees, maybe sixty feet tall.

A family used to live here, but now the cattle have pushed into their old home, seeking shelter from the winter storms. They have stomped the floorboards into the ground, rubbed against the supporting braces, knocking down walls and leaving strands of their hair on the nails that stick out. The brick chimney has collapsed, leaving a hold in the roof for the rain, the snow, and the wind to come in. Soon, the entire building will fall to the ground, leaving the cattle without a shelter.

The soil around this old farm is sandy. In the thirties, when the drought and the grasshoppers came, it blew. Badly. Where there was once wild and lush prairie, a home to buffalo, prairie dogs, coyotes, and Indians, shifting sand dunes grew, rolling and crashing like a storm-tossed sea behind the plow. Now the grass grows only in clumps almost a foot apart, so fragile one can reach down and pull it up by the roots with one easy jerk. The thick rich sod of the prairie has been replaced by scattered desert plants, cactus, and yucca. Only a few years ago have some of the worst blowouts grassed over enought to stop the blowing. Now, depleted, exhausted, this old farm is a winter pasture for our cattle; the people who lived here have left, probably for the city.

There are many old farms like this on my family's ranch in southeastern Montana. We remember them by the names we call places--the Chapman place, the Morton place, the Pepper place, the Blazer place, the Sawyer place, the Harris place, the Jones place, the Hough place, the Frankie place, and the home place. And perhpas there are a few places whose names we have forgotten. Those all were farms and homes that my family took over when the land would no longer support them. When I was a little boy, we had one of the largest ranches in Fallon County. Now, though we have sold one of our land and have even bought some more, most of our neighbors are bigger than we are.

Perhpas one day, following this 'natural' progression, it all will simply become the Sikorski place, and the names of all the places my family remembers will be forgotten, like the names of all the places the Indians remembered.

The Reagan administration, and now the Bush administration, following the truth of our time, calls this progress. The ineffient and nonproductive are swallowed up and diplaced by the more efficient and more productive, and the whole economy is more rational as a result. Resources--human as well as nature's--are recentered, redistributed, and used in a way that maximizes their utility for a global economy. Large scale is more efficient and more productive, more capable of rendering up nature as a resource for the economy, and so it is more rational. Who but a poet can be so sentimental to doubt this truth?

--from Modernity and Technology: Harnessing the Earth to the Slavery of Man
Wade Sikorksi

The practice of freedom in daily life, and that includes artistic freedom, is always a liberatory act that begins with the will to imagine.

--bell hooks

To begin with, artists have to engage in a process of education that encourages crtiical consciousness and enables them as individuals to break the hold of colonizing representations.

--bell hooks

Maddie (watching a trailer for a futuristic film): Mommy, are we in the future?
Me: Yes, we are--we were born and we are in it!~
Maddie: Is there a powerful army protecting us?
Me: No Maddy, we are the army that is protecting us.
Maddie (after a silent moment): oh no . . .

To tell the whole truth, our personal individuality is a personage which is never completely realized, a stimulating Utopia, a secret legend, which each of us guards in the bottom of his heart.

--Ortega y Gasset

"Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, which simultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule. The eunuch-like voice of the crooner on the radio, the heiress's smooth suitor, who falls into the swimming pool in his dinner jacket, are models for those who must become whatever the system wants. Everyone can be like this omnipotent society; everyone can be happy, if only he will capitulate fully and sacrifice his claim to happiness." (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947)

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"Now is the time for you to access power," says the voice, "the power within your own imagination, the dream-apparatus you endlessly write into digital being. The first thing you need to do is encounter your screenal space of dreaming."

That is why in the last resort there is only poetry. We cannot live without imagination; adoring and exaggerating life, lavishing itself of change. This property of imagination is not a human aberration, but a manifestation of the fundamental nature of life.

from Negation, Subjectivity and the History of Rhetoric
Victor Vitanza

And writing itself, the process, the production of a script? It is a romance, of course, `an explosion of dreams and desires',[13] by turns painful and euphoric, but compulsive and utopian either way. Like romance, writing is narcissistic to a degree, at its most elementary level a quest for recognition, the place where the subject appears. But it is also an attempt to reach the beyond of the demand, to transgress the ordering processes of the symbolic or to suspend its prohibitions. And in this sense writing is where, paradoxically, the subject disappears, undergoes the death, precisely, of the author. Nowhere is it more apparent that subjectivity inhabits the field of the Other than in the effort to write something difficult, to formulate an idea which remains either stubbornly elusive or drearily banal. Moreover, to the degree that to write is to exceed, however momentarily, the space allotted to the subject in the signifying chain, to break the symbolic Law, it is also to know for sure, at least from time to time, that the cogito is neither in control nor an origin. In that respect, you might choose to say, why it's almost like being in love ...

from Writing about Desire
Catherine Belsey