“The very march of the alphabet aided the Encyclopedia‘s belief in the ethical equivalence of manual work to supposedly higher pursuits. In French roi (king) lies near rôtisseur (a roaster of meats or fowl), just as in English ‘knit’ follows upon ‘king.’ As the historian Robert Darnton observes, the Encyclopedia seized on such couplings as more than happy accidents; these take the authority of a monarch down a peg by making it prosaic.”
(Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 92.)
“Troubles with materiality have a long pedigree in architecture. Few large-scale building projects before the industrial era had detailed working drawings of the precise sort CAD can produce today; Pope Sixtus V remade the Piazza del Popolo in Rome at the end of the sixteenth century by describing in conversation the buildings and public space he envisioned, a verbal instruction that left much room for the mason, glazier, and engineer to work freely and adaptively on the ground. Blueprints – inked designs in which erasure is possible but messy – acquired legal force by the late nineteenth century, making these images on paper equivalent to a lawyer’s contrat. The blueprint signaled, moreover, one decisive disconnection between head and hand in design: the idea of a thing made complete in conception before it is constructed.”
(Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, pp. 41–42.)
“But the course of this century has revealed a strange equation: state power goodwill = state power. The reason is simple: at the level of the state the ties of affection through which the will becomes good can no longer be felt. We touched on this when speaking of gifts as anarchist property. There are definite limits to the size of the feeling community. Gift exchange, as an economy of feeling life, is also the economy of the small group. When the commonwealth is too large to be based on emotional ties, the gift feeling must be abandoned as a structuring element. For gift-feeling is not impartial. It will always seek to suppress its opposite. Small groups can absorb such antagonism because they can also support affection, but the antagonism of large groups is organized and cold. All commonwealths are way of the stranger, but the huge ones – especially when threatened – put him to death.”
(Lewis Hyde, The Gift, pp. 349–350.)
“The mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction – black ‘soul,’ gypsy duende, the noble savage, the simple farmer, the virile game keeper – obscures the harshness of modern capitalist poverty, but it does have a basis, for people who live in voluntary poverty or who are not capital-intensive do have more ready access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty.”
(Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, p. 29.)
“I must add one more word on what it is to consume because the Western industrial world is famous for its ‘consumer goods’ and they are not at all what I mean. Again, the difference is in the form of the exchange, a thing we can feel most concretely in the form of the goods themselves. I remember the time I went to my first rare-book fair and saw how the first editions of Thoreau and Whitman and Crane had been carefully packaged in heat-shrunk plastic with the price tags on the inside. Somehow the simple addition of air-tight plastic bags had transformed the books from vehicles of liveliness into commodities, like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing. In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller where both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another. Consumer goods are consumed by their owners, not by their exchange.
The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else’s capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing.”
(Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, pp. 11–12. Cf. Duchamp’s eau et gaz.)
“ ‘Purgatory is not a place, sweetheart. Purgatory is that spiritual condition of restless yearning in which the dead, having in the moment of death caught as it were a first-last instantaneous glimpse of the face of God, are denied a second look – which will distinguish them – so long as a single living soul remembers them – as they actually were, that is to say, not as represented in—”
(James McCourt, Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey, p. 512.)
“All animals are expert, yet we use them merely as help. If only we knew how to get the best out of them – each in its special capacity – we would be infinitely more successful at holding off the machines that threaten us with creeping destruction.”
(Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-Plastique, trans. Irving Weiss, p. 173)
“The Greeks wanted to know everything so that they could think better and the Romans so that they could act better, but the medieval Christians wanted it for the greater glory of God and the remission of their sins. To us today, faced with a knowledge explosion of truly staggering proportions, all three of our ancestor cultures may look thoroughly naive in their hopes. We should be cautious in out conclusions, however; as their descendants, we carry in the strata of our minds all sorts of fossil gifts from them.”
(Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference, p. 67.)
“Like Thales, Solon and Chilon, Periander of Corinth was considered on of the Seven Sages of Greece. To others, like Aristotle, he was simply a tyrant. However, there is a bizarre story about the lengths to which Periander went in order to conceal his place of burial: he instructed two young men to meet a third man at a predetermined place and kill and bury him. Then he arranged for four men to pursue the first two and kill and bury them. Then he arranged for a larger group of men to hunt down the four. Having made all these preparations, he went out to meet the two young men for he, Periander, was the third man.”
(Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers, p. 5.)
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