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.)

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 A]esthetic objects – especially outdated ones – ‘make time appear’ in ways that contest dominant modes of writing and feeling properly historical: they demand that we read, and they themselves write,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.)

On the Need to Forget

“Perhaps too much value has is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.  Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value, in and of itself.  Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead…But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history.  there is simply too much injustice in the world…To make peace is to forget.  To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.”

-Susan Sontag, 2003 (Regarding the Pain of Others.  New York: Penguin.  Pg. 103)

problematization

“But what I am attempting to do as a historican of thought is something different.  I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem for people who behave in specific sorts of ways, who have certain types of habits, who engage in certain kinds of practices, and who put to work specific kinds of institutions…The history of thought is the analysis of of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were familiar and ’silent,’ out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions.  The history of thought, understood in this way, is the history of the way people begin to take care of something, of the way they become anxious about this or that”

-Michel Foucault, 1983 (Fearless Speech.  Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).  Pg. 74)

He’s so vain

“It is difficult for a man to speak too long of himself without vanity.”

-David Hume, 1776 (‘My Own Life’ In The Cambridge Companion to David Hume.  David Norton, Ed.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Pg 351)

Fail

“Those historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognize that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history.”

Hayden White, 1985 (“Fictions of Factual Representations” Tropics of Discourse.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.  Pg 126-7)

Counting (methodological) chickens

“…Hence inquiry begins midstream, always already embedded in a situation, one both settled and unsettled…

“…There are situations that may reach a determined state rapidly and others where it is not possible to tell before the inquiry is well underway whether, and in what manner, and for how long, it will take to move beyond a first loose state to one in which both the situation and its determinants become clearer, more determinate.  Thus, to claim to know beforehand precisely what one is going to do, or to find, as grant proposals demand, would constitute bad method, poor logic, and falsely disciplined inquiry.  Or, more accurately, it seems to me, run the risk of no doing inquiry at all…

“…since inquiry arises within a problematic and indeterminate situation, the inquirer is not outside the situation, nor is she in a position such that she could construct something that was not to a degree present already…

“…Hence, problems and solutions are terms that are joined in practice and in that sense coproductive…The solution to a particular problem consists in a series of steps whose particularities are not know before those steps are undertaken”

Paul Rabinow, 2008.  (Marking Time.  Princeton NJ: University of Princeton Press.  Pp 8-10)

The Price is right

“our colonization of each other’s minds in the price we pay for thought”

-Mary Douglas, 1975 (via A Social History of Truth.  Steven Shapin.  1994.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  Pg 28.)

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)

Assignment

“Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.  Though, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake.  This it leaves, respectfully deluded, to the highest-paid, thereby making itself measurable”

-Theodor Adorno, ‘IQ’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 196)

Thought so.

“…the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar…knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience…Every thought which is not idle, however, bears branded on it the impossibility of its full legitimation, as we know in dreams that there are mathematics lessons, missed for the sake of a blissful morning in bed, which can never be made up”

-Theodor Adorno, “Gaps”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 80-1)

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)