..[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.

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.

“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.

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).

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.]

It’s tempting to shout ‘Stop It! The truth is that television in Britain is commissioned by middle-aged people who rarely watch the box, attempting to reach young people who look at it even less, when it’s actually watched by old people. Twenty to twenty five year olds aren’t sitting goggle-eyed for one very good reason: they’ve got better things to do. The people who do watch it – and pay their licence fees and their other bills – are older people. Why don’t you give them what they want?

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