Quotes

Not all human speech is fraught with contention, not every word uttered is political

It is fair to add, though, that I may well be putting words in Foucault's mouth here

It is difficult to determine what constitutes "local" and "foreign" culture within any society [...].

From the heyday of Stalin's culture czar Zhdanov onward, the apparatus sees cultural production as a minor category of ideological activism and the function of art as indoctrination, providing clear answers to social questions.

In the realm of intellectual life, the goal of the Communist Party was to annihilate any form of genuine creativity: literature, history, art, and philosophy were to be ideologically subordinated to the political sphere. The whole cultural tradition was reinterpreted in order to meet the new dogmas: the main names of Romanian literaure were obliterated [wiped out] from official publications, censorship was ruthlessly applied to eliminate anything that smacked of 'nationalism'. 'cosmopolitanism', 'objectivism' or other forms of 'bourgeois decadentism'

What occurred instead was the simulation of a break with Moscow, the ethnicization (Romanization) of an elite that had little to do with national traditions, and the concoction of the corporatist-ethnocentric 'Romanian ideology' under Ceauşescu.

If all societies and, significantly, all the ‘totalitarian institutions,’ in Goffman’s phrase, that seek to produce a new man through a process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e.

Das Neue ist unausweichlich, unvermeidlich, unverzichtbar. Es gibt keinen Weg, der aus dem Neuen führt, denn ein solcher Weg wäre auch neu. Es gibt keine Möglichkeit, die Regeln des Neuen zu brechen, denn ein solcher Bruch ist genau das, was die Regeln erfordern.

Das Alte muß zu jeder Zeit immer erneut erfunden werden, und deshalb sind alle Renaissancen gleichzeitig auch große Erneuerungen.

[E]s gibt in gewissem Sinne nichts Traditionelleres als die Orientierung am Neuen.