Monthly Archives: September 2008

productive changes of sense

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“For treachery is always what occurs when a text, a work of art, or a concept travels to faraway places and becomes something completely different from what it was at its source, within its context of origin. These are felicitous acts of betrayal, productive changes of sense. Misprision, misreading, and misuse are the three virtues of cultural exchange. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler recognized as much. Behind his pessimism and his debatable partitions, Spengler, the first to diagnose an inexorable “Decline of the West,” also noted the importance of intersections and influences, of this ‘art of deliberate misunderstanding‘ indissociable from each culture’s pure essence: ‘The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it’ – something he already seemed to celebrate, praising the ‘trace’ of Plato in Goethe’s thought to illustrate his point, as well as ‘the history of the “three Aristotles” – Greek, Arabian and Gothic.’ ”

(François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, pp. 336–337.)

the accumulation is too much to bear

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“. . .  Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you’ve broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it’s just . . . sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.”

(Gaddis, The Recognitions, pp. 113–114.)

of near-recognition of reality

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“—Yes but, when I saw it, it was one of those moments of reality, of near-recognition of reality. I’d been . . . I’ve been worn out in this piece of work, and when I finished it I was free, free all of a sudden out in the world. In the street everything was unfamiliar, everything and everyone I saw was unreal, I felt like I was going to lose my balance out there, this feeling was getting all knotted up inside me and I went in there just to stop for a minute. And then I saw this thing. When I saw it all of a sudden everything was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it. You don’t see it in paintings because most of the time you can’t see beyond a painting. Most paintings, the instant you see them they become familiar, and then it’s too late. Listen, do you see what I mean?”

(Gaddis, The Recognitions, pp. 91–92.)

how to describe the years?

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“All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,
pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,
less noticeable things. The past is forgotten till next time.
How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,
careless of being touched. Some took each other’s trash out,
put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out
before anyone noticed, it was like a chiaroscuro
                                                                                        of collapsing clouds.
How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,
or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.”

(John Ashbery, from “Chinese Whispers”.)

to fracture the text

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“There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about . . . writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and . . . I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.”

(David Foster Wallace, quoted.)

the american college observed

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“But the norm in these matters is rather the campus at the edge of the woods, in conformity with the agrarian mythology of nineteenth-century America, according to which a bucolic setting far from the vices of the city will serve to guarantee probity, force of character, and academic excellence. Many of these campuses have a more or less newly built science building of ‘science center’ and a Gothic-style dormitory, a little valley bright with autumn leaves, and seasonal rites that are off limits to strangers. Student societies – fraternities for boys and sororities for girls – proudly display the Greek letters than name their houses (Kappa Alpha, Sigma Phi) and follow strict internal regulations inherited from the first campus literary salons of the 1820s. In the spring, graduation ceremonies proceed according to unchanging codes, caps and gowns imprinted with the emblem of the campus and the discreet color schemes of the disciplines (navy blue for philosophy, sky blue for education, etc.) The almost systematic internment of the students – this too as a result of English influence – in dormitories that were once under close surveillance is supposed to ensure academic camaraderie and ethical community among the students. But this is a form of commingling to which the campuses also owe the tradition of students’ demands for better living conditions, on the model of the ‘Bad Butter Rebellion’ that shook Harvard in 1766.”

(François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, pp. 34–35.)

stein/wittgenstein

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“If Gertrude and Ludwig had ever met, apparently they could have talked for hours about the sixth Act IV of An Exercise in Analysis (1917). The act in its entirety is: ‘Now I understand.’ This is the sort of statement that worried Wittgenstein for the last thirty years of his life. It involves the problem of other minds, of certainty, of epistemology, and the language game. We can supply many contexts for such a statement.”

(Guy Davenport, “Late Gertrude”, p. 189 in The Hunter Gracchus.)