Incorporation Quotes - page 2
We have been aware of the need for these institutional strategies at least since 1935 - but of course before, but I'm choosing 1935 because that was the year when W.E.B. Du Bois published his germinal Black Reconstruction in America. And the question was not what should individual Black people do, but rather how to reorganize and restructure post-slavery society in order to guarantee the incorporation of those who had been formerly enslaved. The society could not remain the same - or should not have remained the same. Neoliberalism resists change at the individual level. It asks the individual to adapt to conditions of capitalism, to conditions of racism.
Angela Davis
The incorporation of every indidual in a collective mechanism of production, would mean the renunciation (or surrender) for man himself of its independence and his dignity as a rational (or thinking, or reasonable) being. The results (or consequences) of such a state of things would be: regression (or retrogression) and deterioration in every fields (or domain) of life. For the true progress consist in the accomplishment of higher ends, et these would be directly (or right off) made impossible in a coercive social mechanism. Let us think to the fate that, in these conditions, new truths would have in store ("Qu'on songe au sort qui, dans ces conditions, serait réservé à des vérités nouvelles", Fr.)
African Spir
In a sense, human flesh is made of stardust.
Every atom in the human body, excluding only the primordial hydrogen atoms, was fashioned in stars that formed, grew old and exploded most violently before the Sun and the Earth came into being. The explosions scattered the heavy elements as a fine dust through space. By the time it made the Sun, the primordial gas of the Milky Way was sufficiently enriched with heavier elements for rocky planets like the Earth to form. And from the rocks atoms escaped for eventual incorporation in living things: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur for all living tissue; calcium for bones and teeth; sodium and potassium for the workings of nerves and brains; the iron colouring blood red... and so on.
No other conclusion of modern research testifies more clearly to mankind's intimate connections with the universe at large and with the cosmic forces at work among the stars.
Nigel Calder
In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. We have learned, mostly from Alfred Adler, that what man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem. But man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man's natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies.
Ernest Becker
