Quotes of the week
Posted on August 24th, 2007, under Reading, Gender
Hmm, I’d like to start a new Friday series for all of you who spend the week reading, largely on your own, for whatever work you’re doing. Wouldn’t it be nice to share with others the most interesting idea you encountered? Would it help mark the end of a long week to remember what you learned and what excited you? Would this sort of positive inventory help change some of the isolation of research and trigger new directions in reading in response to others? Maybe a kind of cross between speed dating and book club. Anyway, I’ll get the ball rolling below, and if the idea takes your fancy, maybe you can add yours in a comment.
We could even argue that compulsory heterosexuality is a form of RSI. Compulsory heterosexuality shapes what bodies can do. Bodies take the shape of norms that are repeated over time and with force. Through repeating some gestures and not others, or through being orientated in some directions and not others, bodies become contorted: they get twisted into shapes that enable some action only insofar as they restrict the capacity for other kinds of action.
From Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006: p. 91
On August 24th, 2007 at 12:32 pm, barry said:
ooooh, i like that.
On August 25th, 2007 at 5:54 pm, Jason W said:
Jeremy Paxman - James McTaggart Memorial Lecture - 2007
Paxman is the UK’s more confrontational version of Kerry O’Brien - he commands enormous respect as the host of late night politics show Newsnight. His lecture was reflecting on British television (and particularly news and current affairs), asking “what is it for”? Some of it is “elite media”-type doomsaying, but some of it is interesting and relexive, and this quote is a pretty original perspective on TV programming and commissioning, if nothing else. You can find the rest here
On August 28th, 2007 at 12:41 am, kris cohen said:
“…are we not theories which meet up with experiences that raise us into questions?”
Christopher Bollas in Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience,” p. 68-9.
[sorry. i know that’s more cryptic than inspiring, maybe, but the phrase is nested inside a longer sentence that uses terms that it takes Bollas entire books to define, so there was no hope of contextualizing. i liked the sense that we carry ourselves as theories (at the best of times, maybe), that experiences crack those theories and “raise” us into questions.]
On August 30th, 2007 at 6:23 pm, Catri said:
It doesn’t seem possible to remain apart, on the margins, to shut oneself up in one’s house, knowing nothing and wanting nothing – not even wanting to want anything, that’s not much use – never opening the letter-box, never answering the phone, never drawing back the bolt however loudly they knock, even if they seem about to break the door down, if doesn’t seem possible to pretend that no one lives there or that the person who did has died and doesn’t hear you, to be invisible at will and when one chooses, it isn’t possible to be silent and to eternally hold your breath while still alive, it’s not even entirely possible when you believe that you inhabit this earth no longer and have abandoned your name. It simply isn’t that easy, it isn’t that easy to erase everything and to erase yourself and for not a trace to remain, not even the last rim or the last remnant of a rim, it’s not easy simply to be like the bloodstain that can be washed and scrubbed and suppressed and then . . . then one can begin to doubt that it ever existed.
Javier Marias, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear, (Vintage, London: 2006) 180.
Is fiction breaking the rules? Marias is a Spanish novelist thinking through questions of truth, exile, betrayal, history and historicity in hard-headed prose which challenges the designation fiction. He works, I think, in the same tradition as Sebald, Saramago et al. I’ve read only the first exhausting, exhilarating installment of the ‘Your Face Tomorrow’ trilogy, ‘Fever and Spear’, and found myself enthralled by the capacities of speculative fictions, of a writing voice which takes an unsteady subjectivity as its enabling premise. It seems to me that this excerpt, and indeed the whole book, speaks directly to the Modernist notions of aesthetic exile and self-abstraction, concepts highly relevant to me as I try to get Away (from it all).
On August 31st, 2007 at 10:56 am, melgregg said:
Bravo people!! What wonders you (sh)are.
On August 31st, 2007 at 6:58 pm, clif said:
jeez you lot; I don’t want to read MORE …:p
On August 31st, 2007 at 9:27 pm, Rachel o'Reilly said:
Adding to last week, or beginning this one (and for those that missed the films):
“Although art may lose so much of its autonomy and poetic “unreality” when utopianism takes over the unfolding present of history, that the very existance of specific artistic activity comes to be seen as something alienating that ought to be eliminated, once the utopian hopes have faded - art recovers (more fully than ever for Godard) its autonomy and proper function. […]
Believing in art, “despite everything”, its deficiencies and its own impossibility, is not withdrawal from historicity but on the contrary, seeking exposure to it, going through its horror but without succumbing to it, and completing the work by confronting its own impossibility to keep faith with the need for the as-yet-unrealized.”
From ‘Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century’, Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour. (Sorry I’m late). I really liked this but don’t know if you all will find it as I did. It’s a kind of fridge magnet reminder of the principles of art’s autonomy when maybe the fridge is empty or you think you’re just craving chicken.
On August 31st, 2007 at 9:39 pm, Rachel o'Reilly said:
and there’s actually some problems with that first sentence in the book (which I repeated)..
Maybe change the first ‘that’ to ‘and’, and change the comma after ‘eliminated’ to a dash, and the following dash to a comma.
There you go.
On September 16th, 2007 at 12:22 pm, Kirsten said:
(Coming in a bit late here, but I’ve just discovered your blog, through lurking on the cultural studies email list…)
..[O]ur goal is to open up conversations about how people live,
rather than close down with a definitive description and analytic statements about the world as it ‘truly’ exists outside the contingencies of language and culture. I believe the conversational style of communicating has more potential to transform and change the world for the better. As a multivoiced
form, conversation offers the possibility of opening hearts and increasing understanding of difference.
‘Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy’, Ellis, Carolyn S.; Bochner, Arthur P., Journal Of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 429-449, August 2006, p. 435.