Slow Death vs a Crisis
“Often when scholars and activists apprehend the phenomenon of slow death in long-term conditions of privation they choose to misrepresent the duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives it as a fact in ordinary time. [...] Of course this deployment of crisis is often explicitly and intentionally a redefinitional tactic, a distorting or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event because as a structural or predictable condition it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis seems already to have called for.”
-Lauren Berlant, 2007 (“Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency.” Critical Inquiry 33. P. 760)
Reading with care
“At some level we have not demanded even of ourselves that we ascertain whether we believe this hypothesis to be true; we have felt that there was so much to learn first by observing the automatic nervous system of a routinized dismissal of it in terms of today’s Theory. The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions. How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in any given case would allow one to ask: What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment of the past that it no longer is? And how are those possibilities to be found, unfolded, allowed to move and draw air and seek new voices and uses, in the very different disciplinary ecology of even a few decades difference?”
-Eve Sedgwick, on reading Silavan Tomkins, 2003 (Touching Feeling. Durham NC: Duke. Pgs 117-8.)
A world destroyed
“the current obsession with the fetus represents, a la 2001, a displaced identification with future generations and a denial about the present. Modern Western culture seems to fantasize that a world destroyed for future generations can be redeemed by reproducing”
-Michael Warner, 1991 (“Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text 29. Pg. 10)
Reparations
…”it’s often the ludicrous anachronisms within a given object or practice that operate as portals to other uses [...] like what Sedgwick means by reparative criticism: that because we can’t know in advance – we can know only retrospectively, if even then – what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically and idiosyncratically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around with us and stacking it in eclectic piles [... A]esthetic objects – especially outdated ones – ‘make time appear’ in ways that contest dominant modes of writing and feeling properly historical: they demand that we read, and they themselves write, historiographically aslant. The apprehension of thus requires a certain stillness.”
-Elizabeth Freeman, 2007 (“Still After.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3). Pg. 497-9.)
Talking in walls
“The walls we have to erect about ourselves are immaterial walls, the walls of an idiolect whose terms and turns of phrase are not in the dictionary and the manuals of rhetoric. Not only the talk of lovers, but every conversation that is resumed again and again becomes, over time, incomprehensible to outsiders. There is secrecy in every conversation. In the measure that this wall of secrecy gets thinner, we more and more utter but current opinions, conventional formulas, and inconsequential judgements”
-Alphonso Lingis, 1994 (The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Pg. 77)
Dialogue and its Discontents
“The very notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not. The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated. Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes ‘agreement’ and ‘unity’ and indeed that those are the goals to be sought.”
-Judith Butler, 1990. (Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Pg. 20)
Provisions
“There are two ways to die, two ways to sleep, two ways to be stupid – a head first dive into chaos or stabilized installation in order and chitin. We are provided with enough senses and instinct to protect us against the danger of explosion, but we do not have enough when faced with death from order or with falling asleep from rules and harmony”
-Michel Serres, 1980 [2007] (The Parasite. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pg 127)
things we have to fear
“If there is a fear that, by no longer being able to take for granted the subject, its gender, its sex, or its materiality, feminism will founder, it might be wise to consider the political consequences of keeping in their place the very premises that have tried to secure our subordination from the start.”
-Judith Butler, 1995 (“Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism.” In Feminist Contentions: a philosophical exchange. New York NY: Routledge. Pg 54)
to deface is to know
“this notion of criticism as defacement would seem to get something right about the nature of the complicity between the critic and the object, because defacement succeeds to the degree that it engages with internally with the object defaced, enters into its being, we might say, no matter how crude or offensive, subtle or witty, the defacement may be. By virtue or disvirtue of such mimetic and metonymic engagement, the energy emerging from defacement is an energy flowing from an active and activated object of critique and not from a corpse on the dissecting table”
-Michael Taussig, 1999 (Defacement. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Pg. 43)
Battles
“The performativity approach makes it possible to exhibit the struggle between worlds that are trying to prevail; it makes the struggle for life between statements visible. Each statement, each model, battles to exist. But the Darwinian metaphor stops there. In reality this struggle between statements is a struggle between sociotechnical agencements. It is not the environment that decides and selects the statements that will survive; it is the statements that determine the environments required for their survival.”
-Michel Callon, 2007 (“What does it mean to say that economics is performative?” In Do Economists Make Markets? Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 332)
Home is where the books are
“Once you’ve packed and unpacked as many books [as I have in my move to New York in 1999], then that’s where you live!”
-Salman Rushdie, 2008 (via Space & Culture)
Hunting budies
“The ethnographer pressed the point, asking what they would think or say if, through some impossibility, this eventuality [a man sleeping with his sister] managed to occur. Informants had difficulty placing themselves in this situation, for it was scarcely conceivable: ‘What, don’t you want a brother-in-law? Don’t you realize that if you marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister, you will have at least two brothers-in-law, while if you marry your own sister you will have none? With who will you hunt, with whom will you garden, whom will you go to visit?…Incest is socially absurd before it is morally culpable. The incredulous exclamatiuon from the informant: ‘So you do not want a to have a brother-in-law?’ provides the veritable golden rule for the state of society”
-Claude Levi-Strass, 1969 (The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. Pg. 485)
Dialectic of Conjuring-Obfuscation
“The fact that the 18th century failed to note any connection between the critique it practiced and the looming crisis – no literal proof of an awareness of the link could be found – this very fact led to our thesis: that the critical process of enlightenment conjured up the crisis in the same measure in which the political significance of that crisis remained hidden from it. The crisis was as much exacerbated as it was obfuscated in the philosophy of history. Never politcally grasped, it remained concealed in historico-political images of the future which caused the day’s events to pale – events that became so much less inhibited in heading for an unexpected decision.”
-Reinhart Koselleck, 1959 (Critique and Crisis. Cambridge MA: MIT. Pg. 9)
Breathtaking
“To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment – that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of ‘the modern,’ and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it absurt to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about wat and massive injustice and terror”
-Susan Sontag, 2003 (Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Penguin. Pg 98-9)
leave a comment