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the virtuous knight of accuracy (“I don’t have many ideas but at least what I say is true”); the doctor of inexhaustible information (“You haven’t said anything about this thing or that, or even that which I know about and you are certainly ignorant of”); the great witness of Reality (“No grand systems but life, real life, with all its contradictory riches”); the heartbroken scholar who weeps over his little piece of earth just pillaged by barbarians: jut as if after Attila the grass would not grow again.

-Foucault, L’Impossible prison

London Labour and London Poor

There is a cant abroad at the present day, that there is a special pleasure in industry, and hence we are taught to regard all those who object to work as appertaining to the class of natural vagabonds; but where is the man among us that loves labour? For work or labour is merely that which is irksome to perform, and which every man requires a certain amount of remuneration to induce him to perform. If men really loved work they would pay to be allowed to do it rather than require to be paid for doing it. That occupation which is agreeable to us we call amusement, and that and that only which is disagreeable we term labour, or drudgery, according to the intensity of its irksomeness. Hence as the amount of remuneration given by way of inducement to a man to go through a certain amount of work becomes reduced, so does the stimulus to work become weakened, and this, through the decline of wages, is what is daily taking place among us.

Health is life lived in the silence of the organs.

Madagascar, 1901-1902

Would a soldier, knowing that he had to live in a village, be as quick to burn it? Building a road was often more complicated than firing a cannon at a village. In a new colonial army, patience would be classified as heroism. Gallieni and Lyautey dreamt of new men, who were not merely soldiers but who constituted “above all a collectivity, a reservoir of foremen, leaders, teachers, gardeners, farmers, all ready with no further expense from the metropolis, to be the first cadre of colonial improvement, the first initiators of the races for whom we have the providential mission of opening the industrial, agricultural and economic way and, it must be said, a higher moral life, a fuller life.” In Algeria, Bugeaud had built communities in which civilian life was militarized down to the smallest details; Lyautey proposed the reverse: the civilianization of military life.

-Paul Rabinow, French Modern (1989)

The Uncanny Valley