Carlos

3.5+/5.0

“FAITH is the head chemist of the mind. When faith is blended with the vibration of thought, the subconscious mind instantly picks up the vibration, translates it into its spiritual equivalent, and transmits it to Infinite Intelligence, as in the case of prayer.” P. 45

“Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession” p. 72

“Of all the ages of civilization, this is the most favorable for the development of the imagination because it is an age of rapid change. Everywhere we come into contact with stimuli that develop the imagination. Through the aid of the imaginative faculty, humankind has discovered, and harnessed, more of Nature's forces during the past 50 years than during the entire history of the human race previous to that time.” P. 97

“Moreover, he was probably the most powerful man who ever lived. His power was passive, but it was real.
Let us study the method by which he attained his stupendous power. It may be explained in a few words. He came by power through inducing over 200 million people to coordinate, with mind and body, in a spirit of harmony for a definite purpose. In brief, Gandhi accomplished a miracle, for it is a miracle when 200 million people can be induced-not forced to cooperate in a spirit of harmony, for a limitless time. If you doubt that this is a miracle, try to induce any two people to cooperate in a spirit of harmony for any length of time. Every person who manages a business knows what a difficult matter it is to get employees to work together in a spirit even remotely resembling harmony.” P. 199

Contenido explícito y fuertemente descriptivo. El desarrollo de los personajes y situaciones es impredecible. Una muestra de la identidad árabe y de la forma de vivir en el exilio o en la prisión más grande del mundo. Podría llorar y reír en la lectura de este libro.

5.0—The book is a must on social entrepreneurship. Prof. Yunus is incredibly inspiring, especially for a person like me with a social science background hoping for a change (revolution, to be honest) related to the current rules of capitalism. There is a start to that change, empowering those excluded from the system. As we use our privileges to give voice to the ones who don't, the system will change and incorporate ideas from brilliant people who were excluded, intentionally or unintentionally. My favorite quotes:

“Grameen is a self-help organization. We only want to liberate the genius of individuals to create a better life for themselves. We are not an organization bent on forcing anyone to do anything they do not want”. p. 174

“The reason for this is obvious– they have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital which calls the tune. Profit is unashamedly biased towards capital. The poor work for the benefit of someone who controls the productive assets. Why can't the poor control any capital? Because they do not inherit any capital or credit, nor does anybody give them access to capital, because we have been made to believe that the poor are not to be trusted with credit– they are not creditworthy. But are banks people- worthy?” p. 273

“The answer is obvious. If we consider ourselves as passengers in this spaceship called earth, we will find ourselves riding in a pilotless, route- mapless, destinationless journey. If we can convince ourselves that we are actually the crew of this spaceship, and we are here to take this ship to a specific socio- economic destination, then we will continue to approach this destination, even if we make mistakes along the way or are forced to take detours. We need to know the destination– if not in a precise way, at least in a broad way. We must continue to search for the precise destination, and build up a consensus about it” p. 335

“Poverty does not belong to civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be. When schoolchildren go with their teachers and tour the poverty museums, they will be horrified to see the misery and indignity of human beings. They will blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition and for allowing it to continue for such a large part of the population until the early part of the twenty- first century”. p. 335

I find the second half most interesting than the first one, because it encourages me to keep reading the rest of the novels due to the anxious feelings and adrenaline I experienced reading this part. It seems to be a young adult novel but I know everybody could enjoy it. 3.5/5.0.

Before getting into de Conclusions, my punctuation was three stars, for the same reason Frase said in this last chapter: “But none of these model societies are meant to represent something that could be implemented overnight, in a complete transformation of current social relations. Indeed, probably none of them is possible at all in a pure form; history is simply too messy for that, and real societies exceed the parameters of any theoretical model”.
What I really enjoy, is the relation with movies and books that Frase does through the book, making the explanation easier and understanding his examples. What I do not like that much is how utopian his writing was. We really need a new/better future, for sure. But I think it is not going to be just one of them itself but a configuration of many of them.

“Things in our world may not play out with such literal deceptions, but we can already see how our political and economic elites manage to justify ever-higher levels of misery and death while remaining convinced that they are great humanitarians” Pos. 1616

I really enjoyed this book. Bill Konigsberg really knows how to transmit the feelings between Ben and Rafe. I'm going to keep reading his books because I couldn't tolerate that end.
My favorite quote: “How do you take a break from who you are, Shay Shay?”

3.0/5

“Fear, stark fear, and the shame of such fear-that was the legacy left her by Martin. And yet he had made her so happy at first, she had felt so contented, so natural with him; but that was because they had been like two men, companions, sharing each other's interests” p. 104

“This book uses “low theory” (a term I am adapting from Stuart Hall's work) and popular knowledge to explore alternatives and to look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations. Low theory tries to locate all the inbetween spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions of the gift shop. But it also makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal. And so the book darts back and forth between high and low culture, high and low theory, popular culture and esoteric knowledge, in order to push through the divisions between life and art, practice and theory, thinking and doing, and into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing” p.15

“Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon “trying and trying again.” In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards” p.16

“From the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures. In many ways this has been the message of many renegade feminists in the past. Monique Wittig (1992) argued in the 1970s that if womanhood depends upon a heterosexual framework, then lesbians are not “women,” and if lesbians are not “women,” then they fall outside of patriarchal norms and can recreate some of the meaning of their genders”p.17

“Not an optimism that relies on positive thinking as an explanatory engine for social order, nor one that insists upon the bright side at all costs; rather this is a little ray of sunshine that produces shade and light in equal measure and knows that the meaning of one always depends upon the meaning of the other”p.18

“Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants and is motored by wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo, among other animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal. Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy” p19

“Similarly the computer scientists who pioneered new programs to produce computergenerated imagery (CGI), as many accounts of the rise of Pixar have chronicled, were academic rejects or dropouts who created independent institutes in order to explore their dreams of animated worlds.2 These alternative cultural and academic realms, the areas beside academia rather than within it, the intellectual worlds conjured by losers, failures, dropouts, and refuseniks, often serve as the launching pad for alternatives precisely when the university cannot”. p20

“Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in 2004 in Social Text titled “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Their essay is a searing critique directed at the intellectual and the critical intellectual, the professional scholar and the “critical academic professionals.” For Moten and Harney, the critical academic is not the answer to encroaching professionalization but an extension of it, using the very same tools and legitimating strategies to become “an ally of professional education.” Moten and Harney prefer to pitch their tent with the “subversive intellectuals,” a maroon community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and renege on the demands of “rigor,” “excellence,” and “productivity” p21

“In place of the “allencompassing and global theories” that the university encourages, Foucault exhorts his students to think about and turn to “subjugated knowledges,” namely those forms of knowledge production that have been “buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations” (2003: 7). These forms of knowledge have not simply been lost or forgotten; they have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical or nonconceptual or “insufficiently elaborated.” Foucault calls them “naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity” (7)—this is what we mean by knowledge from below” p24

“In my book this resistance takes the form of investing in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing” p25

“In fact, to speak personally for a moment, I am not sure that I myself am teachable! As someone who never aced an exam, who has tried and tried without much success to become fluent in another language, and who can read a book without retaining much at all, I realize that I can learn only what I can teach myself, and that much of what I was taught in school left very little impression upon me at all” p26

“The Class (Entre Les Murs, 2008, directed by Laurent Cantet). In the film a white schoolteacher, François Bégaudeau (who wrote the memoir upon which the film is based), tries to reach out to his disinterested and profoundly alienated, mostly African, Asian, and Arab immigrant students”p26

“For Gramsci and Hall, everyone participates in intellectual activity, just as they cook meals and mend clothes without necessarily being chefs or tailors. The split between the traditional and the organic intellectual is important because it recognizes the tension between intellectuals who participate in the construction of the hegemonic (as much through form as through content) and intellectuals who work with others, with a class of people in Marxist terms, to sort through the contradictions of capitalism and to illuminate the oppressive forms of governance that have infiltrated everyday life” p30

“Elizabeth Freeman (2005) has used the Pixar feature Monsters, Inc. to expose the exploitive reality of the neoliberal vision of education and the absence of gender and sexuality in the radical opposition to the neoliberal university. Describing Monsters, Inc. as a film about desire, class, and the classroom, Freeman joins forces with Bill Readings's (1997) scathing indictment of neoliberal university reform and argues that the film, an allegory of corporate extractions of labor, “illuminates the social relations of production” even as it mediates them (Freeman, 2005: 90). In the repeated staging of an encounter between the monster and the child in the bedroom—which in the film is designed to generate screams, which in turn are funneled into energy to power Monstropolis—Monsters, Inc. implies but does not address, according to Freeman, an erotic exchange. For Freeman, the queerness of this encounter must be acknowledged in order for the film to move beyond its own humanist solution of substituting one form of exploitation (the extraction of screams) for another (the extraction of children's laughter)” p33

“Pixar and DreamWorks films in particular have created an animated world rich in political allegory, stuffed to the gills with queerness and rife with analogies between humans and animals. While these films desperately try to package their messages in the usual clichéd forms (“Be yourself,” “Follow your dreams,” “Find your soul mate”), they also, as Freeman implies in her piece on Monsters, Inc., deliver queer and socialist messages often packaged in relation to one another: Work together, Revel in difference, Fight exploitation, Decode ideology, Invest in resistance” p34

“To that end I hope this book is readable by and accessible to a wider audience even if some nonacademic readers find my formulations too convoluted and some academics find my arguments too obvious. There is no happy medium between academic and popular audiences, but I hope my many examples of failure provide a map for the murky, dark, and dangerous terrains of failure we are about to explore” p37

“Stockton proposes that childhood is an essentially queer experience in a society that acknowledges through its extensive training programs for children that heterosexuality is not born but made. If we were all already normative and heterosexual to begin with in our desires, orientations, and modes of being, then presumably we would not need such strict parental guidance to deliver us all to our common destinies of marriage, child rearing, and heteroreproduction” p40

“Her account of pet love registers the need for new graphs and pyramids of sexual oppression and privilege, new models to replace the ones Gayle Rubin produced nearly two decades ago in “Thinking Sex” to complicate the relations between heterosexual privilege and gay oppression. In a postindustrial landscape where the size of white families has plummeted, where the nuclear family itself has become something of an anachronism, and where a majority of women live outside of conventional marriages, the elevation of pets to the status of love objects certainly demands attention” p50

“As we saw with Toy Story, the Pixarvolt films often proceed by way of fairly conventional narratives about individual struggle against the automated process of innovation, and they often pit an individual, independent, and original character against the conformist sensibilities of the masses” p56

“Dory represents a different, a queer and fluid form of knowing, that operates independently of coherence or linear narrative or progression. By some standards she might be read as stupid or unknowing, foolish or silly, but ultimately her silliness leads her to new and different forms of relation and action. In this chapter I discuss acts of loopy stupidity associated with forgetfulness and modes of active and passive forgetting often misread as stupidity. In each scenario a certain kind of absence—the absence of memory or the absence of wisdom—leads to a new form of knowing” p75

“Stupidity in men is represented as, well, disarming (Adam Sandler), charming (Jerry Lewis), comforting (George W.), or innocent (Will Farrell in Elf, Tom Hanks in everything). Male stupidity masks the will to power that lies just behind the goofy grin, and it masquerades as some kind of internalization of feminist critiques. The clueless male in movies usually requires a spunky and intelligent woman to pull him along, educate and civilize him, and this masks the gender inequality that structures their relationship” p78

“For women and queer people, forgetfulness can be a useful tool for jamming the smooth operations of the normal and the ordinary. These operations, generally speaking, take on an air of inevitability and naturalness simply by virtue of being passed on from one generation to another. Women are most often the repositories for generational logics of being and becoming, and then become the transmitters of that logic to the next generation. Aided by a few more plot summaries and some animated films, we will see how forgetfulness becomes a rupture with the eternally selfgenerating present, a break with a selfauthorizing past, and an opportunity for a nonheteroreproductive future. But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;3 we tend to organize the chaotic process of historical change by anchoring it to an idea of generational shifts (from father to son), and we obscure questions about the arbitrariness of memory and the necessity of forgetting by falling back on some notion of the inevitable force of progression and succession” p91

“Delinking the process of generation from the force of historical process is a queer kind of project: queer lives seek to uncouple change from the supposedly organic and immutable forms of family and inheritance; queer lives exploit some potential for a difference in form that lies dormant in queer collectivity not as an essential attribute of sexual otherness but as a possibility embedded in the break from heterosexual life narratives. We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place, not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a place for the new, but where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts” p91

“As a kind of false narrative of continuity, as a construction that makes connection and succession seem organic and natural, family also gets in the way of all sorts of other alliances and coalitions. An ideology of family pushes gays and lesbians toward marriage politics and erases other modes of kinship in the process. In an article in The Nation Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim argue that contemporary marriage politics manages to unite conservatives by consolidating support for the nuclear and conjugal family through marital support programs and a revival of covenant marriage while dividing progressive groups by creating anxiety and conflict about the status of samesex marriage rights. According to Duggan and Kim, the promarriage and profamily campaigns have had to counter rocketing divorce rates and the reality of diverse household forms in the U.S., and they have done so by anchoring the conventional family to financial security in the absence of a welfare state” p92

“Alternative kinship has long been a cause célèbre among gay and lesbian groups and queer scholars, and while anthropologists such as Kath Weston, Gayle Rubin, and Esther Newton have applauded the effort and creativity that go into making new kinship bonds in queer communities, other scholars, mostly psychoanalytic theorists such as Judith Butler and David Eng, have examined the family as a disciplinary matrix and have linked its particular forms of social control to colonialism and globalization.5 Why, many of these scholars have asked, does the nuclear family continue to dominate kinship relations when in reality people are enmeshed in multiple and complex systems of relation? In her work Kath Weston examines how kinship discourses invest in normative temporalities which privilege longevity over temporariness and permanence over contingency. These normative conceptions of time and relation give permanent (even if estranged) connections precedence over random (even if intense) associations. So an authenticating notion of longevity renders all other relations meaningless and superficial, and family ties, by virtue of being early bonds, seem more important than friendships” p93

“The contingency of queer relations, their uncertainty, irregularity, and even perversity, disregards the socalled natural bonds between memory and futurity, and in the process make an implicit argument for forgetfulness, albeit one that is rarely reflected in mainstream texts about memory and forgetting” p95

“Dory links this radical forgetting as a break with history to a notion of queer forgetting within which the forgetful subject, among other things, forgets family and tradition and lineage and biological relation and lives to create relationality anew in each moment and for each context and without a teleology and on behalf of the chaotic potentiality of the random action” p101

“Morrison's novel reminds us that forgetting can easily be used as a tool of dominant culture to push the past aside in order to maintain the fantasy and fiction of a just and tolerant present. While we live every day with the evidence of the damage done by forgetting—the desire in American society to “put slavery behind us,” for example—it is still worth assessing the power of forgetfulness in creating new futures not tied to old traditions. While they do not specifically mention forgetfulness both José Muñoz and Elizabeth Freeman in books on queer temporality construct queer futurity as a break with heteronormative notions of time and history. For Muñoz, queer futurity is a “realm of potential that must be called upon” and that is “not quite here” (2010: 21), for Freeman, queer relations to time are accessed through new arrangements of bodies, pleasure, history, and time, arrangements that she names as “erotohistoriography” or “counterhistory of history itself,” one linked to queerness and accessed through pleasure (2010: 95)” p104

“In fact we can never really put the past back together again in the way that memory promises. In a haunting memoir that is in part a meditation on the impossibility of making the connections between past wrongs and present conditions, Saidiya Hartman asks, “What is it we choose to remember about the past and what is it we will to forget? Did my greatgreatgrandmother believe that forgetting provided the possibility of a new life?” (2007: 15)” p 106

“Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes; capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005), requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for some means certain losses for others” p109

“Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems. What Gramsci terms “common sense” depends heavily on the production of norms, and so the critique of dominant forms of common sense is also, in some sense, a critique of norms. Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope. Other subordinate, queer, or counterhegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive life styles, negativity, and critique” p110