Writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the “imagetext” incarnate

We segregate men from women, and no matter how many times we insist that men and women are equal, men and women should be treated the same, when it comes to the moment of excretion, even the most modern society - especially the most modern society - segregates two restrooms with little icons outside the doors, one wearing a dress, one wearing pants.

Objectivism is basically the same thing as faith-based science or for that matter faith-based foreign policy, where you start out with the assumption "We are good, they are evil," or "We know what is good and right and we know what is wrong," so all questions are settled in advance by a set of ideological prejudices.

Obviously invidious and prejudicial stereotypes need to be deconstructed and overcome, but it's not that they can be destroyed. I think that would be an illusion to think that we can somehow get rid of these basic search templates that allow us to sort out our social lives and to sort out the material world as well.

The great moment I think in human consciousness is when you realize that the object in front of you is perhaps not nameable or is new, it does not fit a stereotype, and so you need to reconfigure your whole structure of knowledge to account for it.

Imperialism, or the conquest and colonization of other populations, other peoples, has had as one of its side effects the growth of a discourse of objectivity. That is, when you encounter something new, something strange, something different, you have to find categories for it, you have to come to terms with new objects.

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.