GBS on Progress

No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in general death from exposure. Nevertheless, the most elaborately housed beings today are born not only without houses on their backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them.
- from "The Perfect Wagnerite"

Said: Orientalism

I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say, of men into 'us' (Westerners) and 'they' (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends. When one uses categories like Oriental and Western and both the starting and end points of analysis, research, public policy...the result is usually to polarize the distinction - the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western - and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies (45-46).

Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle

The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself (2).

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images (4).

…the spectacle aims at nothing other than itself (14).

…the spectacle is the main production of present day society (15).

The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue…(24).

The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image (34).
Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity…(42).

The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation (44).

In the inverted reality of the spectacle, use value (which was implicitly contained in exchange value) must now be explicitly proclaimed precisely because its factual reality is eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because counterfeit life requires a pseudo-justification (48).

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal…(168).

…The “new towns” of the technological pseudo-peasantry clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the historical time on which they are built; their motto could be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever has.” (177).

Jane Jacobs: Pseudoscience of Planning

"(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)"


— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), p183

Marx: No admittance except on business

Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business." Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.

Capital, Vol. 1 p195 1915 edition (Google Books)

Marx: Capitalism is a vampire

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

(p233, my edition)

Kafka: The Right Perception of Any Matter

'The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.'

Kafka, The Trial, Everyman's Library Edition, p238

Berman: Whether We Could Live at All

...where Meyer [Schapiro] bathed us in art that made us see the joy and beauty of modern life, Lionel [Trilling] forced us to read modern literature in ways that made us wonder whether we could live at all.

http://www.instapaper.com/go/16209763/text

Herbert: The Affliction (!)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173622

The Affliction (I)

by George Herbert
When first thou didst entice to thee my heart,
I thought the service brave;
So many joys I writ down for my part,
Besides what I might have
Out of my stock of natural delights,
Augmented with thy gracious benefits.

I looked on thy furniture so fine,
And made it fine to me;
Thy glorious household-stuff did me entwine,
And 'tice me unto thee.
Such stars I counted mine: both heav'n and earth;
Paid me my wages in a world of mirth.

What pleasures could I want, whose King I serv'd,
Where joys my fellows were?
Thus argu'd into hopes, my thoughts reserv'd
No place for grief or fear.
Therefore my sudden soul caught at the place,
And made her youth and fierceness seek thy face.

At first thou gav'st me milk and sweetnesses;
I had my wish and way;
My days were straw'd with flow'rs and happiness;
There was no month but May.
But with my years sorrow did twist and grow,
And made a party unawares for woe.

My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
"Sicknesses cleave my bones;
Consuming agues dwell in ev'ry vein,
And tune my breath to groans."
Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believ'd,
Till grief did tell me roundly, that I liv'd.

When I got health, thou took'st away my life,
And more, for my friends die;
My mirth and edge was lost, a blunted knife
Was of more use than I.
Thus thin and lean without a fence or friend,
I was blown through with ev'ry storm and wind.

Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town;
Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book,
And wrap me in a gown.
I was entangled in the world of strife,
Before I had the power to change my life.

Yet, for I threaten'd oft the siege to raise,
Not simp'ring all mine age,
Thou often didst with academic praise
Melt and dissolve my rage.
I took thy sweet'ned pill, till I came where
I could not go away, nor persevere.

Yet lest perchance I should too happy be
In my unhappiness,
Turning my purge to food, thou throwest me
Into more sicknesses.
Thus doth thy power cross-bias me, not making
Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.

Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show;
I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,
For sure then I should grow
To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.

Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;
In weakness must be stout;
Well, I will change the service, and go seek
Some other master out.
Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.

Eric Bentley on artists and explanations

That it is not always desirable for an artist to become too conscious of what he is doing can be amply illustrated from the career of ... Charles Chaplin. When people explained to Charlie what was going on in his early films, he unloaded their explanations into his later films, which, consequently, are weighed down with explanations. Though the artist, qua artist, does not explain himself, in our day, explanatoriness has become the besetting sin of the cultural climber: Charlie Chaplin thought by explanations—symbolism, message, philosophy—to come up in the world.

Jim Harrison: Eat or Die

Small portions are for smallish or inactive people. When it was all the rage, I was soundly criticized for saying that the cuisine minceur was the moral equivalent of the fox-trot. Life is too short for me to approach a meal with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute.

John Maynard Keynes

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

-John Maynard Keynes

From Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress

Corbin and Strauss: Grounded Theory

"As stated previously, a category stands for a phenomenon, that is, a problem, an issue, and event, or a happening that is defined as being significant to respondents...A phenomenon has the ability to express what is going on.

Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, "Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory" p124, second edition

Robert Wilson: What is it?

"The reason I work as an artist is to ask questions. That is to say, What is it? And not to say what something is. For if we know what it is that we're doing there's no reason to do it."

-Robert Wilson

Beckett: Neary's anger

He was sad, with the snarling sadness of the choleric man. With the chop-sticks held like bones between his fingers he kept up a low battuta of anger.

-Beckett, Murphy p72 (battuta is conductor's way of establishing tempo for an orchestra)

Beckett: Murphy's Tripe

"I declare to my God," said Neary, "sometimes you talk as great tripe as Murphy."

"Once a certain degree of insight has been reached," said Wylie, "all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe."

Samuel Beckett, Murphy p39 (Grove Centenary Edition)

Flaubert: Never Touch Your Idols

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.

Gustave Flaubert, "Madame Bovary" p263 (Leon re: Emma or the other way around)

Flaubert: Description of Children Playing

The children ran around in their canvas shoes as though it had been a playground, and you could hear the clamour of their voices above the clanging of the bell. It diminished with the
oscillations of the great rope, hanging down from the high belfry, which trailed its end on the floor below.

The swallows were gliding, squeaking, slicing the air with their wings, and hurrying back to their yellow nests, beneath the tiles on the coping. At the far end of the church, a lamp was burning, a night-light wick inside a glass hanging up. From a distance, it looked like a white blotch flickering above the oil. A long ray of sunlight cut right across the nave, making it even darker in the aisles and the niches.

Gustave Flaubert, "Madame Bovary" p103 (Penguin edition)

Kapuscinski: On Provincialism of Time

We normally associate the concept of provincialism with geographic space. A provincial is one whose worldview is shaped by a certain marginal area to which he ascribes an undue importance, inaptly universalizing the particular. But T.S. Eliot cautions against another kind of provincialism--not of space, but of time.

"In our age," he writes in a 1944 essay about Virgil, "when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits."

-Ryszard Kapuscinski, "Travels with Herodotus" p270-1

Chekhov on Academics

Voynitsky: ...for twenty-five years [Serebryakov] has been reading and writing things long known to the wise and of no interest to the stupid; so for twenty-five years he has been pouring from one empty vessel to another. And combined with what conceit! What presumption! He retires and not a living soul has heard of him, he is completely unknown; so, for twenty-five years, he has occupied a post which shouldn't have been his. And look at him: he strides about like a demi-god!

Astrov: Well, I think you're envious.

Voynitsky: Yes, I envy him. And he's so successful with women!