Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Sylvia Lavin

Quote by Sylvia Lavin

“Insisting that architecture maintain such a profound lack of character without even the hint of any feeling is not a lack of position or an accidental design flaw but rather a commitment to a once progressive but now painfully outmoded position struggling to maintain its faded hegemony. What was once radical abstraction in pursuit of universality and utopia is today just banal accommodation in pursuit of free corporate expansion.”

Quote by Sylvia Lavin

Book:Kissing Architecture
Create image

Work

Kissing Architecture

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Sylvia Lavin

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Sylvia Lavin. more

You May Also Like

“Opposition to global hegemony cannot be the same as opposition to traditional oppression. It can only be something unpredictable, irreducible to the preventive terror of programming, forced circulation, irreducible to the White terror of the world order. Something antagonistic, in the literal sense, that opens a hole in this Western agony. Something that leaves a trace in the monotony of the global order of terror. Something that reintroduces a form of impossible exchange in this generalized exchange. Hegemony is only broken by this type of event, by anything that irrupts as an unexchangeable singularity. A revolt, therefore, that targets systematic deregulation under the cover of forced conviviality, that targets the total organization of reality.”

OppositionHegemonySimulation Singularity
Book:The Agony of Power
Create image

“Second…decolonizing is about reeducating ourselves in ways that allow us to reconnect with our own souls, minds, and bodies. To rebuild all that has been damaged by the colonial wounds and the disciplinary institutions we dealt with throughout our lives. It is indeed about reeducating ourselves in such ways that we realize our full potential to contribute to our communities and to the wider world. We must learn (or relearn) how to harvest the fruit of knowledge from every part of the world, not just the West.”

WisdomKnowledgeSelf WorthColonialismImperialismDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonial Option
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“One of the biggest and most invisible – which in the long run becomes visible— wounds of coloniality is to make those at the receiving end of it question themselves; their physical, mental, and spiritual value and meaning; their ability to think, invent, innovate, and theorize. It happens so slowly, viciously, and unconsciously that many people suddenly see themselves at a point where the only expertise and knowledge they deem valuable come to them from the heart of Europe and North America. The colonized, slowly but surely, become at once the dagger and the wound to themselves. We come to such a place where we cooperate with the dagger against our own wounds. It takes a long time and reflection to realize that the wound (the colonized mind) will never stop bleeding so long as it is cooperating with the dagger (coloniality).”

ThinkingWisdomCulturePowerColonialismImperialismDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“For example, the colonized people have ‘regimes’ and ‘dictators’, whereas the West has ‘democracies’; the people in the ‘first world’ ‘tolerate’ cancer chemotherapy and ‘tolerate’ refugees or other religions and beliefs; if you go to work and settle in the West, you are an ‘immigrant’, but when Westerners come to plunder your country and get overpaid jobs (often despite mediocre qualifications), they are ‘expats’; and on goes the list of how we devalue ourselves and glorify our killers and plunderers without even realizing it simply through the language we use daily.”

ColonialismExploitationImperialismThird WorldDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialityPlundering
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“The role of the academy as a colonial and imperial space par excellence, which in the age globalization and corporatization of practically everything, has become the biggest enemy of knowledge and the decolonial option. In fact, the academy has become a space that instead of creating options, is doing everything in its power to deny most people options and keep itself as the only game in town.”

WritingKnowledgeColonialismImperialismAcademiaCorporate CultureHegemonyAcademicsDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“I hope it is clear to anyone who has a shred of critical thinking skills that those who fund research projects in Western universities are anything but kind-hearted and generous, and that their intentions are anything but benevolent or intended solely for the objective advancement of knowledge. It is usually more about controlling who gets to produce certain knowledge about others, because nothing maintains the myth of exceptionalism like ensuring that knowledge only comes from the West, and particularly from selected or even appointed individuals.”

WritingPowerResearchColonialismPhilanthropyImperialismAcademiaHegemonyDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“If anything, sources that have the support and protection of power and institutions should be treated as suspicious not superior. There are very few words that make me as nauseous as words like ‘prestige’ and ‘prestigious’. Prestige is often a shortcut for getting power’s approval and blessings, which automatically, in my view, should disqualify any intellectual from being taken seriously.”

PowerPropagandaControlPrestigeElitismHegemonyKnowledge ProductionSubaltern
Author:Louis Yako
Create image