Quote: Brian Holmes

Ultimately what's at stake in all this is understanding the global division of labor, which has been the great enigma since postmodernization began in the eighties. Who works, at what kind of production, under which financial system, for whose consumption--and who doesn't even get the chance to work, whose territory remains tragically undeveloped and destitute, or is destroyed by invasive technologies and pollutants? Again, there is a great role for art to play in these kinds of investigations. Why do people desire certain kinds of production? What do they imagine as a better future? How do they build their solidarities? What are their poetics of the other, how do they communicate beyond their own frameworks? Only when these kinds of questions are answered in such a way as to enter the field of common sense and of the common senses, will we be able to generate the kind of activism I think is really needed. The kind of activism that can stand up, by the strength of numbers and will and by the quality of imagination and desire, to the machinery of continental integration that is now being driven by the predatory rationality of globalizing capital.
--from "Hinting at Ways to Work in Current Contexts: An Interview with Brian Holmes," by Robby Herbst, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2005, p. 17