Theory of volume

“Anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, on ‘Danger in the Voice’, 1887 (The Gay Science.  New York: Vintage.  Pg 210)

Worried about his heirs

“it is important to say something and not just threaten to say something, and there are better things to do with even a defective inheritance than to trash it”

-Clifford Geertz, 2000 (Available Light. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 18)

Off on the right foot

“I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions…Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstaces and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months…The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when separated from this dross.”

-Claude Levi-Strauss sets out, 1955 (Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin. Pg 1)

Standard issue

“Even those intellectuals who have all the political arguments against bourgeois ideology at their fingertips, undergo a process of standardization…What they subjectively fancy radical, belongs objectively so entirely to the compartment in the pattern reserved for their like, that radicalism is debased to abstract prestige, legitimation for those who know what an intellectual nowadays has to be for and what against.  The things they opt for have long since been just as accepted, in numbers just as restricted, in their hierarchy of values just as fixed, as those of student fraternities…their views…are allowed to partake only of pre-selected nutrition, cliches against cliches. [Van Gogh, Proust, books about forest animals, some stalwart spirit, and a few noisy jazz records that make you feel at once collective, audacious and comfortable]  Every opinion earns the approbation of friends, every argument is known by them before-hand.  That all cultural products, even non-conformist ones, have been incorporated into the distribution-mechanisms of large-scale capital, that in the most developed country a product that does not bear the imprimatur of mass-production can scarcely reach a reader, viewer, listener at all, denies deviationary longings their subject matter in advance.  Even Kafka is becoming a fixture in the sub-let studio…they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag”

-Theodor Adorno, on ‘Expensive Reproduction’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 206-7)

A Task

“People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us”

-Theodor Adorno, “Johnny-Head-in-Air”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 56)

Critical Pens

“The echo is heard immediately: but always as a ‘critique’…The work never produces an effect but only another’ critique ; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique…At bottom, however, everything remains as it was…The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action…But their critical pens never cease to flow, for the have lost control of them, and instead of directing them are directed by them.  It is precisely in this immoderation of its critical outpourings…that the modern personality betrays its weakness”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Untimely Meditations.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1983)
87

The English Malady

“Since our wealth has increas’d, we have ransak’d all the parts of the globe to bring together its whole stock of materials for riot, luxury, and to provoke excess…Is it any wonder, then, that the diseases which proceed from idleness and fullness of bread, should increase in proportion, and keep equal pace with those improvements of the matter and cause of disease?”

-George Cheyne, early advocate of vegetarianism, 1733

(via Stuffed & Starved. Raj Patel. Brooklyn NY: Melville House. 2007. pg 77.)

Underdogs

“In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so”

-Theodor Adorno, “They, the People”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005)