Stephanie's Pillowbook

 

PAST

Let me repeat again that the past goes on within the present, and forms a part of it. European man was a Christian, as he was once a Platonist, as he was once a Stoic, as he lived under the governance of Rome, as he was Palaeolithic man; all that he was he continues to be, carrying it all as an abstract ingredient in his present character. The best proof of this lies in the fact that if man had lacked the basic experience of Christianity he would be very different today from what he is. Such is the inexorability of the precise destiny which man has suffered in the concrete course of history. It might have been another kind of destiny; but there it is, it was this kind, precisely this. And in that fact lies the interesting, the dramatic, the inescapable, element in the study of history. [Ortega y Gasset]

What we remember is what we become. What we have forgotten is more kindly and disturbs only our dreams. We become resemblances of our past. [John Osborne]

He who lacks a sense of the past is condemned to live in the narrow darkness of his own generation. [Armenian saying]

From its very beginnings, German classicism was borne along by the hope for a German national rebirth. The return to the Greeks and the disregard for the Roman-French tradition had always been interpreted as the discovery of a national identity. Across the span of two millennia – people were convinced of this – kindred spirits confronted one another. The appreciation for one’s remote origins, for a brilliant prehistory involved the understanding of one’s own present – no the real present, but one which was thought to lie below the surface. It was believed that one’s identity as a chosen people was only to be found in the remote past. [?]

Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving votes to that remotest and obscurest of classes, our ancestors. It refuses to submit to the arrogant oligarchy of those who simply happen to be walking around. [G.K. Chesterton]

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. [Joan Didion]

Let anyone who wishes really to grasp and accept the continuity of life hold out his hand, look at it with unaccustomed eyes, feel its bones and nails, and see if, from somewhere at the base of memory, he cannot recover the feeling of the dark, warm mud squeezing between scaly claws. [Jacquetta Hawkes]

Standing on a little hill in the East African plains, I saw herds of thousands of wild beasts, grazing in soundless peace, beneath the breath of the primeval world, as they had done for unimaginable ages of time, and I had the feeling of being the first man, the first being to know that all this is. The whole world around me was still in the primitive silence and knew not that it was. In this very moment in which I knew it the world came into existence, and without this moment it would never have been. [C.J. Jung]

Within each man, though composed of the same substance of flash and mind, several ‘personalities’ can coexist, sometimes simultaneously, more or less equivalent; sometimes intermittently.
Some of these personalities are coarser than the others – clumsier, more primitive. Occasionally a childish personality re-emerges in a man in his forties. One thinks one is the same. But there is no ’same.’
We believe that, from childhood up, we might have developed into someone else, lived another life. We can imagine ourselves quite different. But this possibility of regrouping the same elements in diverse ways persists – and it is a criterion of Time.
No time has been ‘lost’, none has really ‘passed’, so long as these other personalities are possible.
And in any case my personality – my habit of being such-and-such a man with all his various traits – is akin to a memory. It may fade out like a memory and another personality return, also like a memory. It’s as if we possessed a secondary memory. [Paul Valéry]

Every human being, and every human mind, has roots that extend indefinitely far back through time. The genes that regulate all aspects of our physical development, including the prenatal fabrication of our brains, were in existence long before we or our parents were born. Those genes, in turn, evolved, step by step, from more primitive genetic material that can trace its ancestry back to the first biochemical reactions on Earth. And we do not have to stop there. We can carry the search for the ultimate origin of ourselves back still further-back to the very beginning of the universe. [David Darling]

[Wilde] had never felt what ruin war could bring about until one night in Charleston he turned to someone and said, ‘How beautiful the moon is!’ and had for reply, ‘You should have seen it, Sir, before the war.’ [Richard Ellman]

I do not think you need fear that the study of a dead period, however prolonged and however sympathetic, need prove an indulgence in nostalgia or an enslavement to the past. In the individual life, as the psychologists have taught us, it is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. I think the same is true of society. To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from the past, too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing, enslaved to a fairly recent past. [C.S. Lewis]

What we are is due but in small measure to our own labour and to our personal individuality, for we owe it almost entirely to our ancestors — ancestors by blood and ancestors of our character. If any of us add anything to the common good in the realm of science, of art, or of morality, it is because a long line of generations has lived, toiled, thought, and suffered before us. [Marcellin Berthelot]

For how forcefully they prove to us that the houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us; that they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living. How much better we should live in the old house today! How suddenly our memories assume a living possibility of being! We consider the past, and a sort of remorse at not having lived profoundly enough in the old house fills our hearts, comes up from the past, overwhelms us. Rilke expresses this poignant regret in unforgettable lines which we painfully make our own, not so much for their expression as for their dramatic depth of feeling:
‘Oh longing for places that were not
Cherished enough in that fleeting hour
How I long to make good from far
The forgotten gesture, the additional act.’ [Gaston Bachelard]

In practice, speculations about the past, if they are not to be entirely idle, must relate to the traces which the past has left. [A.J. Ayer]

To be able to look back upon one’s past life with satisfaction is to live twice. [Lord Acton]

We have to describe and to explain a building the upper storey of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure. [C.J. Jung]

It is alleged by a friend of my family that I used to suffer from insomnia at the age of four; and that when she asked me how I managed to occupy my time at night I answered, ‘I lie awake and think about the past.’ [Ronald Knox]

 

PATRIOTISM

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. [George Bernard Shaw]

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. [Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials]

Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. [Charlotte Perkins Gilman]

It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. [Hugo of St. Victor]

Abjuring the realm. To make an interior act of renunciation and to become a stranger in the world; to watch one’s fellow-countrymen, as one used to watch foreigners, curious of their habits, patient of their absurdities, indifferent to their animosities – that is the secret of happiness in this century of the common man. [Evelyn Waugh]

 

PEDANTRY

There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about. [John von Neumann]

Pedantry is greater accuracy than the case requires. [G.M. Young]

 

PESSIMISM

I find nothing more depressing than optimism. [Paul Fussell]

Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong. [Voltaire]

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the “meaning” of life.” [E. M. Cioran]

Optimism, n. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly. [Ambrose Bierce]

The pessimist is the man who believes things couldn’t be worse, to which the optimist replies, ‘Oh yes they could’. [Vladimir Bukovsky]

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true. [Robert Oppenheimer]

 

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy, like Medicine, has many drugs, very few good remedies, and almost no specifics. [Chamfort]

A bright young chachem told his grandmother that he was going to be a Doctor of Philosophy. She smiled proudly: ‘Wonderful. But what kind of disease is philosophy?’ [Leo Rosten]

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. [William James]

All are lunatics, but he who can analyse his delusions is called a philosopher. [Ambrose Bierce]

All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. [Ludwig Wittgensten]

Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. [Henry Brooks Adams]

The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity. [Merleau-Ponty]

[Philosophy:] Any systematic scheme of thought which allows you to be unhappy intelligently. [?]

A chief rule in philosophy is to produce no deus ex machina, to assume no sense or instinct where you can still make do with association and mechanism. [Georg Lichtenberg]

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting. [Simone Weil]

Philosophers
must ultimately find
their true perfection
in knowing all
the follies of mankind
—by introspection. [Piet Hein]

Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that everything is all right. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking. [William James]

Philosophy is at bottom homesickness—the longing to be at home everywhere. [Novalis]

Philosophy has had from its earliest days two different objects which were believed to be closely interrelated. On the one hand, it aimed at a theoretical understanding of the structure of the world; on the other hand, it tried to discover and inculcate the best possible way of life. [Bertrand Russell]

[Philosopher:] People who talk about something they don’t understand, and make you think it’s your fault. [Voltaire]

Nothing so absurd can be said, that some philosopher has not said it. [Cicero]

What binds everything I do together is philosophy. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

… a real-life occurrence, recounted to Peter [Cook] by Kenneth Williams, who’d met a taxi driver who’d had Bertrand Russell in the back of his cab, and recounted by Peter to the readers of the Daily Mail in his weekly column, ‘Peter Cook’s Monday Morning feeling.’ ‘The brilliant philosopher was quite surprised when the cabby turned around and said, “Hello, Bertie, I’ve read a lot of your books. What’s life all about then?” Apparently the aged sage was speechless. “Would you believe it?” the cabby said to Kenneth. “I asked the world’s greatest philosopher a simple question, and he didn’t know the fucking answer”.’” [William Cook]

If one wants to be available for thought a stringent and icy code is requisite. One must first learn to develop a predatory sense for anything comforting that could be excised from one’s life. For instance, all the little luxuries that, once savoured, have become habitual; every residue of leisure and indulgence buried in routines; and every relic of ancient mollifications (even when these are disguised as disciplines, as chastisements, as despair). Since the human being is a social animal it is inevitable that – pushed beyond a certain threshold – its solitude will become a destitution for it. If one is to generate ‘thinkers’ this must be exacerbated to the extreme. One must seek to eradicate the capacity for love, or rather, since this is unrealistic, one must infuse it with a harsh and paralysing cynicism. It is of particular importance that all traces of tenderness – that most dangerously blissful affect – be ground rigorously into the dirt. Life must be stripped down to its bare frame, and there is always something to be eliminated that one had mistakenly thought was architectural, but which was in fact quite different: merely a reinforcement. For it is only in being allowed to fall that structure discovers its emaciated erectness – its spine.
Philosophy is a discipline. [Nick Land]

That commonplace, automatic philosophy which is released by the stress of dramatic events or during interruptions of normal states of mind – ideas about life’s fragility and brevity, wonderings at the hopeless inconsistency of human experience, reversals of fortune, injustice and the like – this everyman’s philosophy is a simple product of the mind, stupid like all that’s natural and sincere, yet it gives the most accurate measure of what lies deepest in man. The rest is mere luxury, ‘literature’. [Paul Valéry]

But if Caso’s ideas did not exercise any influence on those of the Revolution, his unfailing love of knowledge – which caused him to go on with his classes even while opposing factions were shooting each other in the street – made him a splendid example of what philosophy means: a love that nothing can buy and that nothing can pervert. [Octavio Paz]

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false. [Carl Friedrich Gauss]

The value of philosophy is to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. He who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age, or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. As soon as we begin to philosophise, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. [Bertrand Russell]

Philosophy as a general rule is like stirring mud or not letting a sleeping dog lie. [Samuel Butler]

When you are philosophising you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]

Stripped of its pedantic or portentous trappings, the question put by the philosopher is always puerile. A man interrogating needlessly is a child; he lacks the majesty of the tiger resigned to be magnificently what he is, just as he is, whatever he is; or the bland simplicity and impersonality of the sheep within the flock. [Paul Valéry]

… the first condition of real and genuine achievements in philosophy, as in poetry and the fine arts, is a wholly abnormal disposition which, contrary to the rule of human nature, puts in the place of the subjective striving for the well-being of one’s own person, a wholly objective striving, directed to an achievement that is foreign to one’s own person and precisely on this account is very appropriately called eccentric and sometimes even ridiculed as quixotic. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind. [Mortimer Adler]

Philosophy is a reluctant mistress – one can only reach her heart with the cold steel in the hand of passion. [Bertrand Russell]

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation. [Eugene Ionesco]

[Wittgenstein thought Ramsey bourgeois:]… he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community. He did not reflect on the essence of the state – or at least he did not like doing so – but on how this state might reasonably be organised. The idea that this state might not be the only possible one in part disquieted him and in part bored him. He wanted to get down as quickly as possible to reflecting on the foundations – of this state. This was what he was good at and what really interested him; where there is real philosophical reflection disturbed him until he put its result (if it had one) to one side and declared it trivial. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]

Philosophical and aesthetic questions are so richly obscured by the quantity, diversity, and antiquity of researches, arguments, and solutions, all produced within the orbit of a very restricted vocabulary, of which each author uses the words according to his own inclinations, that taken a whole such works give me the impression of a district in the classical underworld especially reserved for deep thinkers. Here are the Danaides, Ixions, and Sisyphuses, eternally labouring to fill bottomless casks and to push back the falling rock, that is, to redefine the same dozen words whose combinations form the treasure of speculative philosophy.
Allow me to add to these preliminary considerations one last remark and one illustration. Here is the remark: you have surely noticed the curious fact that a certain word, which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday speech, and which presents no difficulty when caught up in the rapidity of an ordinary sentence, becomes mysteriously cumbersome, offers a strange resistance, defeats all efforts at definition, the moment you withdraw it from circulation for separate study and try to find its meaning after taking away its temporary function. It is almost comic to inquire the exact meaning of a term that one uses constantly with complete satisfaction. For example: I stop the word Time in its flight. This word was utterly limpid, precise, honest, and faithful in its service as long as it was part of a remark and was uttered by someone who wished to say something. But here it is, isolated, caught on the wing. It takes its revenge. It makes us believe that it has more meanings than uses. It was only a means, and it has become an end, the object of a terrible philosophical desire. It turns into an enigma, an abyss, a torment of thought… [Paul Valéry]

… every philosopher or lover of the truth is an extremist. [Herbert Read]

By philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands. [Johann Gottlieb Fichte]

To create a healthy philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician. [Bertrand Russell]

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]

[Metaphysics:] The art of bewildering oneself methodically. [Jules Michelet]

If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers. [Frederick the Great]

What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]

A philosophy is not disposed of by the mere assertion that it is false. [Friedrich Engels]

One day Aristippus of Cyrene was asked what benefits he had gained from philosophy. And he, whom they called ‘the royal dog,’ replied: ‘that of being able to speak freely to everyone.’ [Michèle le Doeuff]

For philosophy, all kinds of foreign matter are good and it can even be said that good matter is always foreign. [Georges Canguilhem]

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning. [Bertrand Russell]

Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with. [Jerry A. Fodor]

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. [Isaiah Berlin]

As philosophers have frequently found, the real world seems too messy, too stubbornly arbitrary, to be found out by the power of thought alone, no matter how fine the guiding sense of aesthetics. [David Lindley]

To ask questions of the sort which philosophers address to themselves is usually to paralyse the mind… [David Bloor]

It is a great pity that things have reached such a pass in our age, and that philosophy is now, even to men of intelligence, a vain and chimerical name, a thing of no use or value either in the popular opinion or in reality. The cause, I think, lies in these quibblings which have blocked the approach to it. It is very wrong to describe it to children as the unapproachable study, and as frowning, grim, and terrible of aspect. Who has disguised it in this wan and hideous mask? Nothing can be gayer, more agile, more cheerful, and I might almost say more sportive. It preaches nothing but jollity and merry-making. A sad and dejected air shows that here philosophy is not at home. When Demetrius the grammarian found a bunch of philosophers seated together in the temple of Delphi, he said to them: ‘To judge by your serene and cheerful faces, I should say that you are engaged in no deep discourse.’ To which one of them, Heracleon of Megara, replied: ‘It is for those who inquire whether the future of the verb ballo should have a double l, or who seek the derivation of the comparatives cheiron and beltion, and of the superlatives cheiriston and beltiston to wrinkle their brows as they discuss their subject. But philosophical conversation quickly enlivens and delights those who take part in it; it does not depress them or make them sad.’ [Montaigne]

Philosophy is the only academic subject enshrined in our current curricula to be named neither for a well-defined subject matter (rocks, plants, etc.) nor for a product or method (the logos of biology and psychology, the nomos of astronomy and economics). Philosophy is named, instead, as an effect or emotion whose object is identified only vaguely: philosophy is the love of wisdom. [Alan White]

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]

Without philosophy we should be little above animals. [Voltaire]

That’s why I love philosophy: no one wins. [Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki]

Philosophers are intellectual troublemakers. [A.J. Ayer]

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]

Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning. [Alfred North Whitehead]

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems. [Rudolf Carnap]

Philosophy… is the front trench in the siege of truth. Science is the captured territory. [William James Durant]

 

PHOSPHENES

Phosphenes are defined as luminous endogenous patterns experienced with the eyes closed. They are, among other things, what we see when we ’see stars’ on emerging from darkness into light, or vice versa… The reader may begin by experimenting with his own (harmless) production of phosphenes by the simple method of placing the fingers on closed eyelids and exerting differing degrees of pressure. Weak pressure produces phosphenes of curvilinear form, discs, concentric circles or arcs. These tend to appear at the side of the visual field opposite the point at which the pressure is applied; strong pressure exerted in the same way produces a ‘chequerboard’ effect…
Outside the laboratory there are numerous situations in which phosphenes occur spontaneously. We may pay little attention to them in many circumstances, for they are often fleeting. They are provoked by a state of fatigue and drowsiness; as a result of psychological or mechanical shock; during fasting and meditation; or chemical intoxication. They further manifest themselves as vehicles of illumination in mystical traditions, and in the phenomenon known as the ‘prisoner’s cinema’, experienced by people incarcerated in dark dungeons; they might perhaps be related to phantoms and ghosts; they are the hazard recognized by the long-distance lorry-driver peering for hours into a snowstorm, and by pilots flying alone at high altitudes in empty, hence visually clueless, skies. Toxins such as those associated with scarlet fever produce phosphenes as do hallucinogenic drugs (that is those which have by definition a selective affinity for the visual system)…
Phosphenes tend, by virtue of their form, to fall into one of two broad categories, , representational, and geometrical or abstract…
Phosphenes can be shown to differ according to the method of stimulation, electrical or chemical. Electrically induced phosphenes are of abstract or ornamental type patterns with only vibrational or repeating movements, whilst chemically-induced phenomena also include landscapes and living or man-made objects, such as flowers, animals, machines, and fast-moving, firework-type patterns. [?]

The strong evidence that chimpanzees, baboons, monkeys, cats, dogs, and other animals hallucinate suggests that altered states of consciousness and hallucinations are a function of the mammalian, not just the human, nervous system and that ‘non-real’ visual percepts were experienced long before the Upper Paleolithic. Indeed, australopithecines probably hallucinated. Be that as it may, the nervous system is a human universal, and we accept that, by the Upper Paleolithic, it was much the same as it is now. The content of early human mental imagery is, however, more problematic than its existence, because cultural expectations inform the imagery to a considerable extent. For a conservative beginning to an investigation of possible Upper Paleolithic mental imagery we therefore comment less on culturally informed hallucinations than on a feature of altered states completely controlled by the nervous system.
Under certain circumstances the visual system generates a range of luminous percepts that are independent of light from an external source. Although there was interest in these visual percepts in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of this one, it was not until the 1920s that Heinrich Klüver began the systematic analysis of the phenomena. Working under laboratory conditions, Klüver concluded that these percepts were not just visual ‘dust; they had form. Abstracting redundant form elements from his subjects’ reports of altered states of consciousness, he arrived at four groupings of the percepts. Some years later, Horowitz, unaware of Klüver’s work, similarly abstracted redundant from elements from reports of altered states. He then found that his elements, despite their ‘indescribableness’, corresponded very largely with Klüver’s categorization. Other workers have confirmed these findings and identified further recurring form elements. Their research has shown that these visual phenomena, although complex and diverse, take take geometric forms such as grids, zigzags, dots, spirals, and catenary curves. All these percepts are experienced as incandescent, shimmering, moving, rotating, and sometimes enlarging patterns; they also grade one into another and combine in a bewildering way. Because they derive from the human nervous system, all people who enter certain altered states of consciousness, no matter what their cultural background, are liable to perceive them.
These geometric visual percepts can be induced by a variety of means. Under laboratory conditions, electrical stimulation and flickering light produce them, but although flickering fire light may have played a role in the past, we clearly have to look elsewhere to explain prehistoric experience. Psychoactive drugs generate the percepts, but fatigue, sensory deprivation, intense concentration, auditory driving, migraine, schizophrenia, hyperventilation, and rhythmic movement are some other generating factors. Much more researched will have to be done before it can be established whether specific geometric forms are associated with particular circumstances of generation.
Nomenclature for these visual percepts poses some problems. Hoping to avoid a diversionary logomachy, we follow Tyler in using entopic phenomena (from the Greek, ‘within vision’) to mean visual sensations derived from the structure of the optic system anywhere from the eyeball to the cortex. This term covers two classes of geometric percept that appear to derive from different parts of the visual system – phosphenes and form constants. Phosphenes can be induced by physical stimulation, such as pressure on the eyeball, and are thus entophthalmic (‘within the eye’). Form constants derive from the optic system, probably beyond the eyeball itself. We distinguish these two kinds of entopic phenomena from hallucinations which have no foundation in the actual structure of the optic system. Unlike phosphenes and form constants, hallucinations include iconic visions of culturally controlled items such as animals, as well as somatic and aural experiences. [J.D. Lewis-Williams & T.A. Dawson]

 

PHOTOGRAPHY

Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning beauty. [Jean Baudrillard]

I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse. [Diane Arbus]

You don’t take a photograph, you make it. [Ansel Adams]

Levine has said that, when she showed her photographs [copies of a poster of an Edward Western photo of a boy] to a friend, he remarked that they only made him want to see the originals. ‘Of course,’ she replied, ‘and the originals make you want to see that little boy, but when you see the boy, the art is gone.’ For the desire that is initiated by that representation does not come to closure around that little boy, is not at all satisfied by him. The desire of representation exists only insofar as it never be fulfilled, insofar as the original always be deferred. [Douglas Crimp]

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. [Henri Cartier-Bresson]

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. [Dorothea Lange]

 

PIANISTS

I knew that the total energy I would expend upon that piano that evening would be at least a number of tons, equal to the energy a boxer expends upon his antagonist at a prize fight, equal to killing three large-size bulls, perhaps four – I would be ready to drop with exhaustion. [George Antheil]

The pianist must have unusual intelligence and culture, feeling, temperament, imagination, poetry, and finally that personal magnetism which sometimes enables the artist to inspire four thousand people,strangers, whom chance has brought together, with one and the same feeling… If any of these qualities are missing the deficiency will be apparent in every phrase he plays. [Ferruccio Busoni]

You must know the work so well that if you are awakened at four o’clock in the morning and told to play a concerto for a conductor, you can do it instantly and without complaint. [Claudio Arrau quoting his teacher Martin Krause]

No one was less bothered about this than Schnabel himself (whose favourite motto was ‘Safety last!). Once during a recording of a Beethoven concerto, he played with exceptional conviction and illumination but dropped notes by the bushel. The conductor, noting this, suggested that it might be better if they tried again. ‘It might be better,’ said Schnabel. ‘But it wouldn’t be as good.’ [Jeremy Siepmann]

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides. [Artur Schnabel]

Look, I will play the wonderful nocturne of Chopin in G. The legato thirds seem simple! Ah, if I could only tell you of the years that are behind those thirds. The human mind is peculiar in its method of mastering the movements of the fingers, and to get a great masterpiece so that you can have supreme control over it at all times and under all conditions demands a far greater effort than the ordinary non-professional music lover can imagine. [Vladimir Pachmann]

[Rachmaninov] was the only pianist I have ever seen who did not grimace. That is a great deal. [Igor Stravinsky]

He who wishes to gain the most through hearing my Klavierstücke transfers them onto a cassette, puts on earphones, closes his eyes, imagines seating himself in front of the piano and moves his hands and fingers – in thought, but even better actually physically – synchronously and on the keys parallel with the music. Doing this, he repeats each piece and individual passages until he is, to some extent, together with the pianist.
In this process, he becomes aware that this music trains a new kind of human being, who he not yet is and who has never before existed on this planet. A human being who can not only witness music which is similar to heartbeats and breathing and walking and running and hammering and sawing and swimming and bicycle riding and dancing and sexing, but who can rather participate in the spatial and temporal differences, leaps, curves, changes of direction in involutionary melodies, rhythms, dynamics which, up to now, would have been considered ’superhuman’.
If one considers it at all worthwhile to empathise with temporal and spatial experiences of other living beings which live faster or slower, narrower or wider than the human being (insects, fish, birds, plants, trees, clouds, etc), one can actually achieve this only through some few works of new music, which no longer affirm the human being as he is today, but rather take him along on an endless journey into his own future…
For a start, one could try – even if just for fun – to speak like Klavierstücke. ‘To understand’ actually means to initially be able to move innerly in the heard rhythm, in the heard melody and envelope. [Karlheinz Stockhausen]

PIANO, (n.). A parlour utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the instrument and the spirits of the audience. [Ambrose Bierce]

There is no more ‘genuine’ piano music than the etude. The very essence of the piano becomes music in that form. {Oscar Bie]

The pedal is the soul of the piano. [Anton Rubinstein]

It is in the nature of the [piano's sustaining] pedal to contribute a hovering quality to the tone. Even an isolated note, played with the pedal, will sond different from the same note played with the pedal. The softly chaotic humming of other strings wraps the note in a mysterious cloud of uncertainty which, as long as it remains subtle enough not to disturb the harmonic sense, stimulates the imagination and the sensibility. Uncertainty is a prime stimulant for the latter. [Theodor Kullak]

My answer is that now I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a neverending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much. For instance, Chopin’s studies are lovely pieces, perfect pieces, but I simply can’t spend time on them. I believe I know these pieces; but playing a Mozart sonata, I am not so sure that I do know it, inside and out. Therefore I can spend endless time on it. [Artur Schnabel]

 

PITY

I experience a very unpleasant sensation if anyone takes pity on me, as the word is commonly used. That is why when people are really angry with someone they employ the expression:such a person is to be pitied. This kind of pity is a species of charity, and charity presupposes need on one side and superfluity on the other… [Georg Lichtenberg]

I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one. [Aneurin Bevan]

No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by. [Franz Schubert]

 

PLAGIARISM

You’ve got to be able to copy things faithfully before you can deviate. [Damien Hirst]

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid… is self-plagiarism. [Marcel Proust]

Plagiarism is what the world’s about. If you didn’t start seeing things and stealing because you were so inspired by them, you’d be stupid. [Malcolm McClaren]

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it. [Anatole France]

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. [Albert Einstein]

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors’ works have survived even in part. [Richard Stallman]

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere. [Pablo Casals]

My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge to come and steal.” [John Updike]

It is conscious plagiarism that demonstrates invention: we are so taken with what someone else did that we set out to do likewise. Yet prospects of shameful exposure are such that we disguise to a point of opposition; then the song becomes ours. No one suspects. It’s unconscious stealing that’s dangerous. [Ned Rorem]

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it. [Lukas Foss]

[The whole history of Latin literature in the Middle Ages was]… the history of the appropriation, re-working and imitation of someone else’s property. [Paul Lehmann]

Language for Vico, particularly poetic language, is always and necessarily a revision of previous language. Vico, so far as I know, inaugurated a crucial insight that most critics still refuse to assimilate, which is that every poet is belated, that every poem is an instance of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit or ‘retroactive meaningfulness.’ Any poet (meaning even Homer, if we could know enough about his precursors) is in the position of being ‘after the Event,’ in terms of literary language. His art is necessarily an aftering, and so at best he strives for a selection, through repression, out of the traces of the language of poetry; that is, he represses some of the traces and remembers others. This remembering is a misprision, or creative misreading, but no matter how strong a misprision, it cannot achieve an autonomy of meaning, or a meaning fully present, that is free from all literary context. Even the strongest poet must take up his stance within literary language. If he stands outside it, then he cannot begin to write poetry. The caveman who traced the outline of an animal upon the rock always retraced a precursor’s outline. [Harold Bloom]

To read means to borrow; to create out of one’s readings is paying off one’s debts. [Georg Lichtenberg]

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings. [Theodor Adorno]

It is well known that Benjamin often dreamed of constructing a work that would be nothing but a mosaic of quotations. One unavoidably thinks here of the practice attributed to the ancient Egyptians who, following the precise rules for constructing new temples, drew their material from edifices that had just been demolished. In this way, the debris left by certain literary works would become a quarry for new works. With Benjamin the ingenuity of the method is accentuated by the arbitrary choice of the authors he cites – arbitrary in that his readings were not necessarily the works he read to the end (of which he scrupulously kept a list). Whether it happened to be Jochmann or Blanqui, Benjamin frequently found the subjects for his studies and fresh paths of thought as a consequence of his flâneries in libraries with his collector’s eye or of the sort of ‘objective chance’ so dear to the surrealists. [Pierrre Missac]

Maupassant’s story offered me an ideal framework on which to embroider. This notion of using a framework begs the question of plagiarism, something I wholeheartedly approve of. To achieve a new Renaissance the state should encourage plagiarism. Anyone guilty of real plagiarism should have the Legion of Honour. I’m not joking: plagiarism served the great writers well. Shakespeare reworked stories from Italian authors, among others, Corneille took Le Cid from Guillem de Castro, Molière ransacked the classics; and all were right to do so. Using someone’s story frees you from inessentials. The one thing that’s unimportant in art is inventing a story. What matters is how you tell the story. With a given story, you’re free to concentrate on details, on developing the character and situations. [Jean Renoir]

Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St.Antoine without signing my name at the end of it. [Oscar Wilde]

If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research. [Wilson Mizner]

A plagiarist is an artist in the art of choosing. This is a great art. [Paul Valéry]

It’s much too good for him; he did not know what to do with it. [Handel when accused of stealing some music from Bononcini]

But the impulse to write can only come from previous contact with literature. [Northrop Frye]

A confused and limiting notion of priority allows that only the original proponents of an idea can understand and use it. But the history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowings. Cultures are not impermeable; just as western science borrowed from the Arabs, they had borrowed from India and Greece. Culture is never a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures. This is a universal norm. [Edward Said]

I should like to see every man tinkering with every other man’s art; what kaleidoscopic multitudinous results we should see! [Percy Grainger]

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. [Salvador Dali]

One always begins by imitating. [Eugene Delacroix]

What does it mean for a painter to… actually imitate someone else? What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can’t! [Pablo Picasso]

I use not only all the brains I have, but all those I can borrow as well. [Woodrow Wilson]

Macpherson created ‘Ossian’, the inspired bard who sang of his own especial soil in tones of plangency and woe; Chatterton embodied the ‘marvellous Boy’ whose apparent suicide provoked contemplations of a solitary genius despised and neglected by contemporaneous society. These two poets, more than any others, created the romantic image. But it was of crucial significance to their literary successors that it should be deeply imbued with forgery and fakery, pastiche and plagiarism.
It might even be said that the recognition or detection of plagiarism and pastiche, in particular, began with the romantic movement itself. In previous centuries, as Walter Ong noted in his The Art of Logic, ‘no one hesitated to use lines of thought or even quite specific wordings from another person without crediting the other person, for these were all taken to be – and most often were – part of a common tradition.’ But when that tradition was broken or discontinued in the rise of the private and personal voice, then apparent originality of expression became of paramount importance. As a result, as if they were intense shadows created by a sudden light, the dangers of plagiarism and pastiche became evident in the first generation of the romantic movement. In one prefatory epistle Milton wrote: ‘I have striven to cram my pages even to overflowing, with quotations drawn from all parts of the Bible and to leave as little space as possible for my own words.’ Wordsworth or Coleridge could never admist so much even if, in Coleridge’s case, a similar confession might have been appropriate. The Introduction to an important volume of essays upon English romanticism, Romanticism and Language poses an interesting question: ‘Is it pure coincidence, for example, that several of the essays [here] fix on the metaphor of theft?’ Romanticism and plagiarism occupy the same area of the English imagination. [Peter Ackroyd]

 

PLEASURE

No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare. [Kingsley Amis]

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures. [Samuel Johnson]

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. [Jane Austen]

Too much of a good thing is wonderful. [Armistead Maupin]

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it. [Soren Kierkegaard]

… the fear of a pleasure so overmastering that it can break down the sense of reality or at least the pattern of active life. [Kinsley Amis]

Even pleasure, infinitely exquisite, infinitely realizable, becomes infinitely tedious. [Robin Scott Wilson]

All pleasures contain an element of sadness. [Jonathan Eibeschutz]

 

POETRY

Every poem we read is a re-creation, that is a ceremonial ritual, a fiesta. [Octavio Paz]

… poetry begins with excess, with immeasure, it is a search fascinated with what is forbidden. [Aimé Cesaire]

Poetry is what is lost in translation. [Robert Frost]

The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. [Pierre Reverdy]

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry. [John Cage]

What is a poet, if not a man who visualises and expresses his ideas and his images more intensely and with more real happiness and life than other men and who, by means of cadenced speech, gives them a quality of fact. [Antonin Artaud]

The poetic embrace like the carnal
While it endures
Forbids all lapse into the miseries of the world. [André Breton]

One of the chief properties of poetry is to inspire in humbugs a grimace which unmasks them and allows them to be judged. [Paul Eluard]

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. [Soren Kierkegaard]

The Universe is a tranquil catastrophe: the poet picks his way among the ruins, looks for what is still just able to breathe beneath the debris, and brings it back to the surface of life. [Saint-Pol-Roux]

Our consciousness is made up of a multitude of elements only a small part of which is capable of being directly formulated in words. What we see with our eyes, for example, is constantly within our consciousness, yet is very rarely actually put into words or thought about verbally. The same applies to visual memories, or internally visualised wish-fulfilment, day-dreaming. There is the multitude of sounds which surrounds us or which drift through our imagination. There are the smells impinging upon us, of which we may hardly be conscious because they form a constant background to our lives, but which, at times, are capable of evoking the most powerful associations and memories (one has only to think of Proust’s madeleine). But, above all, there are the numerous body sensations which are constantly felt although they are hardly ever converted into verbal form, the pressure of the clothes we wear upon our skin, the movement of the air in the room and other external influences, as well as those which operate from within us: the rhythm of our heartbeat and our breathing, the tension of our muscles, the fullness or emptiness of our stomachs, etc…
We tend, on the whole, to equate our consciousness merely with its verbal component, the stream of language that passes through our minds as an unending internal monologue…
For whatever may have set our emotions off, we experience them as body sensations, a quickening of the pulse, a melting relaxation of muscular tensions, a rise in blood pressure or the release of sex hormones with its various physiological effects. Fear and joy, the sublime beauty of a sunset, the arrival of the beloved or, indeed, the exaltation at hearing a beautiful poem are all ultimately experienced as body sensations…
To communicate emotion, which is the stuff of poetry, abstract words were not enough. That is why poetry makes use of concrete aspects of language which directly communicate to the body, elements such as the musical quality of the words, the sensual nature of the sounds they are made of, the rhythmic quality of the poem which directly activates the body’s own rhythms – the beat of the blood, and the vast multitude of non-verbal associations inherent in language and activated by words. [Martin Esslin]

The highest endeavour to which poetry can aspire is to compare two objects as remote as possible from one another, or, by any method whatsoever, to bring them into confrontation in an abrupt and striking way. [André Breton]

Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that unites distant, diverse and seemingly hostile things. [Marinetti]

Silence is the basis of a poem. A poem is the way in which silence is contradicted, offended, deceived, tormented, struck, wounded and vanquished. [Jean Cocteau]

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilisation, no thought, no humanity: even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere. [Apollinaire]

In poetry, technique is another name for morality: it is not a manipulation of words but a passion and an asceticism. [Octavio Paz]

Mr. W: You know him [T.S. Eliot], I suppose, as a literary man, as a writer and… er… and… er… as a poet?
I.A.R: Yes, he’s very well known, you know, as a writer and as a poet.
Mr.W: Tell me, if you will – you won’t mind my asking, will you? Tell me, is he, in your judgement, would you say, would you call him a good poet?
I.A.R.: Well, in my judgement – not everyone would agree, of course, far from it – he is a good poet.
Mr. W: You know, I myself am really very glad indeed to hear you say that. Many of my colleagues wouldn’t agree at all. They think a Banker has no business whatever to be a poet. They don’t think the two things can combine. But I believe that anything a man does, whatever his hobby may be, it’s all the better if he is really keen on it and does it well. I think it helps him with his work. If you see our young friend, you might tell him that we think he’s doing quite well at the Bank. In fact, if he goes on as he has been doing, I don’t see why – in time, of course, in time – he mightn’t even become a Branch Manager. [I. A. Richards]

 

POLITICS

It is at this point [ie at the Reformation] that politics in the modern sense of the term begins, if we here understand by politics a more or less conscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundane purpose, as contrasted with a fatalistic acceptance of events as they are, or of control from ‘above’ [Karl Mannheim]

An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public. [Talleyrand]

‘So, Sir, you laugh at schemes of political improvement?’ ‘Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.’ [Samuel Johnson]

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one. [Henry Miller]

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. [H.L. Mencken]

He was one of those men who think that the world can be saved by writing a pamphlet. [Benjamin Disraeli]

A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrower and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

I will venture frankly to say that the statesman is beyond any doubt an interpreter of dreams… a man accustomed to estimate at its true worth the common, universal great dream which is dreamed not only by the sleeping, but also by the waking. This waking dream, to speak truly, is human life itself… Inasmuch as life is laden with all confusion and chaos and obscurity, the statesman must come forward and like some wise interpreter of dreams he must sit in judgement on the day-dreams and fantasies of his fellows who think that they are awake – using likely conjectures and reasonable persuasions, on such occasions, to show them that this is beautiful and that the reverse; this good and that bad; this just and that unjust. And so too, with other qualities: he will try to show what is prudent, what courageous, what pious, what sacred, what beneficial, what profitable; and again what is unprofitable, what unreasonable, what ignoble, what impious, what profane, what disadvantageous, what injurious and what selfish. And besides these he will also teach other lessons… Be prepared for change. You have often stumbled: hope now for a better time. For with men things turn to their opposite. [Philo Judaeus]

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. [Groucho Marx]

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics. [Thomas Carlyle]

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama. [Irving Babbitt]

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. [J.K. Galbraith]

Non-intervention is a metaphysical idea, indistinguishable in practice from intervention. [Talleyrand]

 

POP

A Pop picture is often a frozen event – it comes across to us instantly, and then has made its point. We need never look at it again; it is disposable…
… very little in them comes to us first hand, as the product of the artist’s own direct observation. He does not re-create, he chooses. His choices are made from among images which have already been, so to speak, processed – not a living girl, but a pin-up in a magazine, not a real tin, a real package, but a tin or package seen in a coloured advertisement or on a poster…
The quality they have in common… is nostalgia. [Edward Lucie-Smith]

I was driving back from New Orleans. I’d gone there with a couple of mates. We used to follow the fortunes of a girl called Chris Colt: The Girl With the Two 45’s – and we’d trailed her from awful strip joint to awful strip joint, getting deservedly ripped off along the way. Anyway, I’d wearied of Chris Colt and I was driving home through the Piney Woods of Texas and the road was dead straight through the trees with the moon at the far end of it, so I was driving along this kind of silver ribbon through the woods, and it was fantastically beautiful. I was listening to Wolfman Jack and he played a great song by Elmore James called “Stranger Blues,” which I hadn’t heard before. The words go “I’m a stranger here, I just drove in your town” and just as I heard them for the first time, I drove over a ridge into this little town, and I thought, “This is the most perfect moment.” Even the fact that I can describe it now in such wearisome detail shows how clearly I remember it. And I’ve always hoped that some of the music I play might have the same effect on other people. [John Peel]

Pop is a ‘cool’ art: it demands neither aesthetic ecstasy nor affective or symbolic participation (‘deep involvement’), but a kind of ‘abstract involvement’, an instrumental curiosity…
In a word, Pop is not popular art. For the ethos of popular culture (if it exists at all) is based precisely on unambiguous realism, on linear narration (and not repetition or the diffraction of levels), on allegory and the decorative… and on emotional participation associated with moral vicissitudes. It is only on a quite rudimentary level that Pop can be mistaken for figurative’ art, colourful imagery, a naïve chronicle of consumer society, etc. It is true that Pop artists take pleasure in this pretence. Their candour is immense, as is their ambiguity. As for their humour, or the humour they are credited with, once again we are on tricky ground… Let us not forget, to return to the system being described, that a ‘certain smile’ belongs to the obligatory signs of consumption – a smile no longer comprised of humour, of critical distance, except as a reminder of that transcendence of critical value manifested in a knowing wink. This false distance is present everywhere, in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising which continually uses it as a cultural allusion, etc. At the very limit, one can no longer distinguish in this ‘cool’ smile between the smile of humour and that of commercial complicity. This is also what happens in Pop, whose smile sums up its whole ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion. [Jean Baudrillard]

Pop is now so basic to the way we live, and the world we live in, that to be with it, to dig the Pop scene, does not commit anyone to Left or Right, nor to protest or acceptance of the society we live in. It has become the common language, musical, visual and (increasingly literary), by which members of the mechanised urban culture of the Westernised countries can communicate with one another in the most direct, lively and meaningful manner. [Reyner Banham]

Few records have that instant impact, that purely subjective élan of half-hysterical stomach-constricting, sublimated sex ecstasy. The description suffers; it cannot be described, only felt. [Penny Reel]

Warming to my theme, I’d like to say I think the abysmal ignorance of educated persons about the popular music of the millions, is deplorable. First, because pop music, on its own low level, can be so good; and I must declare that never have I met anyone who, condemning it completely, has turned out, on close enquiry, to know anything whatever about it. But worse, because the deaf ear that’s turned, in pained disdain, away from pop music betrays a lamentable lack of curiosity about the culture of our country in 1958. For that music is our culture. [Colin MacInnes]

Sir Arthur Bliss, Master of the Queen’s Music, once described the BBC’s pop programme as ‘aural hashish’, but it’s not that good. [Richard Neville]

Parnes made it clear that pop was about one thing: self-recreation. You could be an inner-urban child with a boring circumstance, yet by one simple act – changing your name – you could be transformed for ever into an electronic deity. [Jon Savage]

Popular culture carries that affirmative ring because of the prominence of the word ‘popular.’ And, in one sense, popular culture always has its base in the experiences, the pleasures, the memories, the traditions of the people. It has connections with local hopes and local aspirations, local tragedies and local scenarios that are the everyday practices and the everyday experiences of ordinary folks. Hence, it links with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘the vulgar’ – the popular, the informal, the underside, the grotesque. That is why it has always been counterposed to elite or high culture, and is thus a site of alternative traditions. And that is why the dominant tradition has always been afraid of it, quite rightly. [Stuart Hall]

Rock & roll, the two kinds of syncopation arising from the fundamental rhythm, one discontinuous, the other continuous, merge in an eerie, oscillating stillness for which swing is a wonderfully accurate term. [Robert Cantwell]

And didn’t Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, James Brown, and Jimi Hendrix, enact for us live onstage just what freedom could mean when pushed to the limits of its ecstasies and dangers? [Michael Ventura]

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is. [Noel Coward]

Cheap songs, so-called, actually do have something of the Psalms of David about them. They do say the world is other than it is. They do illuminate. This is why people say, ‘Listen, they’re playing our song’. It’s not because that particular song actually expresses the depth of the feelings that they felt when they met each other and heard it. It is that somehow it re-evokes it, but with a different coating of irony and self-knowledge. Those feelings come bubbling back. [Dennis Potter]

Why are love songs so important? Because people need them to give shape and voice to emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed without embarrassment or incoherence. Love songs are a way of giving emotional intensity to the sorts of intimate things we say to each other (and to ourselves) in words that are, in themselves, quite flat. It is a peculiarity of everyday language that our most fraught and revealing declarations of feeling have to use phrases – ‘I love/hate you’, ‘Help me!’, ‘I’m angry/scared’ – which are boring and banal; and so our culture has a supply of a million pop songs, which say these things for us in numerous interesting and involving ways. These songs do not replace our conversations – pop singers do not do our courting for us – but they make our feelings seem richer and more convincing than we can make them appear in our own words, even to ourselves.
The only interesting sociological account of lyrics in the long tradition of American content analysis was Donald Horton’s late 1950s study of how teenagers used the words of popular songs in their dating rituals. His high school sample learned from pop songs (public forms of private expression) how to make sense of and shape their own inchoate feelings. This use of pop illuminates one quality of the star/fan relationship: people do not idolize singers because they wish to be them but because these singers seem able, somehow, to make available their own feelings – it is as if we get to know ourselves via the music.
The third function of popular music is to shape popular memory, to organize our sense of time. Clearly one of the effects of all music, not just pop, is to intensify our experience of the present. One measure of good music, to put it another way, is, precisely, its ‘presence’, its ability to ’stop’ time, to make us feel we are living within a moment, with no memory or anxiety about what has come before, what will come after. This is where the physical impact of music comes in – the use of beat, pulse and rhythm to compel our immediate bodily involvement in an organization of time that the music itself controls. Hence the pleasures of dance and disco; clubs and parties provide a setting, a society, which seems to be defined only by the time-scale of the music (the beats per minute), which escapes the real time passing outside.
One of the most obvious consequences of music’s organization of our sense of time is that songs and tunes are often the key to our remembrance of things past. I do not mean simply that sounds – like sights and smells – trigger associated memories, but, rather, that music in itself provides our most vivid experience of time passing. Music focuses our attention on the feeling of time; songs are organized (it is part of their pleasure) around anticipation and echo, around endings to which we look forward, choruses that build regret into their fading. Twentieth-century popular music has, on the whole, been a nostalgic form. The Beatles, for example, made nostalgic music from the start, which is why they were so popular. Even on hearing a Beatles song for the first time there was a sense of the memories to come, a feeling that this could not last but that it was surely going to be pleasant to remember.
It is this use of time that makes popular music so important in the social organization of youth. It is a sociological truism that people’s heaviest personal investment in popular music is when they are teenagers and young adults – music then ties into a particular kind of emotional turbulence, when issues of individual identity and social place, the control of public and private feelings, are at a premium. People do use music less, and less intently, as they grow up; the most significant pop songs for all generations (not just for rock generations) are those they heard as adolescents. What this suggests, though, is not just that young people need music, but that ‘youth’ itself is defined by music. Youth is experienced, that is, as an intense presence, through an impatience for time to pass and a regret that it is doing so, in a series of speeding, physically insistent moments that have nostalgia coded into them. This is to reiterate my general point about popular music: youth music is socially important not because it reflects youth experience (authentically or not), but because it defines for us what ‘youthfulness’ is. I remember concluding in my original sociological research in the early 1970s, that those young people who, for whatever reasons, took no interest in pop music were not really ‘young’…
To summarize the argument so far: the social functions of popular music are in the creation of identity, in the management of feelings, in the organization of time. Each of these functions depends, in turn, on our experience of music as something which can be possessed… It should be apparent by now that people do hear the music they like as something special; not, as orthodox rock criticism would have it, because this music is more ‘authentic’ (though that may be how it is described), but because, more directly, it seems to provide an experience that transcends the mundane, that takes us ‘out of ourselves’. It is special, that is, not necessarily with reference to other music, but to the rest of life. This sense of specialness, the way in which music seems to make possible a new kind of self-recognition, frees us from the everyday routines and expectations that encumber our social identities, is a key part of the way in which people experience and thus value music: if we believe we possess our music, we also often feel that we are possessed by it. Transcendence is, then, as much a part of the popular music aesthetic as it is of the serious music aesthetic; but, as I hope I have indicated, in pop, transcendence marks not music’s freedom from social forces but its patterning by them. [Simon Frith]

[Piaf] knows the secret of popular song (the secret Bernhardt knew so well) which is expressivity through banality, the secret of knowing what must be added where. This formula can apply only to ‘popular’ artists: they interpret mediocre works by completing them. [Ned Rorem]

Madonna embodies the spirit of the girls’ Friday night-out. Here the concerns are to have a laugh, to be fashionable and look good for your mates, possibly to have this confirmed by male desire, often to ridicule posing and pretentious men, and to have a good dance. More generally Friday night functions to make women feel good about themselves. Dance is an essential ingredient in the Madonna persona. It is dance for fun, for self-indulgence. It is a display of power, energy and vitality. Paradoxically it involves choreographed control over the body whilst displaying emotional abandonment, loss of oneself through music, and being out of reach of controlling forces. As Madonna’s lyrics stated in 1984: ‘Where’s the Party? I want to free my soul. Where’s the Party? I want to lose control.’ [Beverly Skeggs]

If I was a girl again, I would like to be like my fans, I would like to be like Madonna. [Madonna]

And so the premises and values of literary criticism, political theory, and more recently, cultural studies, are appropriated in an attempt to locate ‘content’ and ‘depth’ in something still generally dismissed as inane and shallow. What counts as ‘content’ and ‘depth’ varies: in the case of Lit Crit it’s an ‘authentic’ account of the human condition; in the case of the politico, it’s social comment or an expression of collective agency; for the cultural theorist, the quest is for the ghost of ‘subversion’, of unconscious resistance to the status quo as inscribed/coded in style. What all these approaches have in common is that their activity takes the form of interpretation and judgement.
But the rock discourse has, from its inception, been host to a renegade tradition. Instead of arbitration, these writers opt for exaltation. Instead of interpretation and elucidation, they seek to amplify the chaos, opacity and indeterminacy of music. Instead of reading and writing, they prefer rending and writhing. Instead of legibility/legitimation, they prefer the illegible and illicit. Instead of seeking to align rock music with constructive ends, they prefer deconstruction/destruction, the sheer waste of energy into the void…

The words, and the need to get those words within earshot of the maximum number of people, have subordinated the music to the level of glossy paper – designed to interfere with clear transmission and reception of the message as little as possible…

The power of pop is situated in so many other places than the good song, or good intention – in the strange, the intolerable, the unattainable, the curiously sexual. While the beaverish construction of good songs continues apace, you’ll find the pop kid skiving off, caressing the cornerstone, transfixed by its coarseness…

It is about noise in the most elastic sense: as well as simple dissonance, it is about many other forms of code jamming – ‘the noise of the body’, the ‘visual noise’ of certain kinds of flamboyance, brio, effervesence, élan (Bolan, Prince, Morrisey); the discordant chaos of contradictory desires, as they escape in the form of impossible reproaches and demands upon life; ‘political noise,’ the uproar that occurs when desire is not articulate as a programme of demands, but is vented as pure demand, blank and intransitive (the ‘nonsense’ of ‘don’t know what I want but I know how to get it’ and ‘we want the world and we want it now’); the geyser gush of glossolalia.[Simon Reynolds]

 

PORNOGRAPHY

[Pornography satisfies]… a universal infant desire for complete, immediate gratification… [it] reaches straight down to the infant layer where we all imagine ourselves the centre of everything by birthright and are sexual beings without shame or need for excuse. [Anne Snitow]

The only thing pornography has been known to cause is solitary masturbation; as for corruption, the only immediate victim is English prose. [Gore Vidal]

Is there any science-fiction pornography? I mean something new, and invention by the human imagination of new sexual experience?…
The point is crucial. Despite all the lyric or obsessed cant about the endless varieties and dynamics of sex, the actual sum of possible gestures, consummations, and imaginings is drastically limited. There are probably more foods, more undiscovered eventualities of gastronomic enjoyment or revulsion than there have been sexual inventions since the Empress Theodora resolved ‘to satisfy all amorous orifices of the human body to the full and at the same time.’ There just aren’t that many orifices. The mechanics of orgasm imply fairly rapid exhaustion and frequent intermission. The nervous system is so organised that responses to simultaneous stimuli at different points of the body tend to yield a single, somewhat blurred sensation. The notion (fundamental to Sade and much pornographic art) that one can double one’s ecstasy by engaging in coitus while being at the same time deftly sodomised is sheer nonsense. In short: given the physiological and nervous complexion of the human body, the number of ways in which orgasm can be achieved or arrested, the total modes of intercourse, are fundamentally finite. The mathematics of sex stop somewhere in the region of soixante-neuf; there are no transcendental series. [George Steiner]

In the midst of all the solemn and dedicated groin spasms that have ensued… arrives one as yet tiny but disturbing note. It is this: over the past twenty years, thanks to the refinement of techniques such as the stereotaxic needle implant, neurophysiologists have begun to study the actual workings of the brain and central nervous system. These investigators find no build-ups of ‘pressure’ or ‘energy,’ sexual or otherwise, for the simple reason that the central nervous system is not analogous to an engine. They regard it more like an electronic circuit, such as a computer or a telephone system. Millions of neurons fire continually, and the electrical energy within the system remains constant. Behaviour is determined, instead, by which lines are open and what messages get through. According to this model, what is the effect of pornography – of group sex – or ‘massages’ – or orgasmic regularity? Far from being a safety valve releasing energy that has been built up inside the system, any such pastime is more like an input that starts turning on the YES gates… to the point where its message (Sex!) closes out all others and takes over the entire circuit. [Tom Wolfe]

If we look closer, all bodies and all faces look alike. The close-up of a face is as obscene as a sexual organ seen from very close. It is a sexual organ. Any image, any body part seen from very close is a sexual organ. It is the promiscuity of the detail, the blow-up – the zoom – which gives it a sexual value. The exorbitance of each detail attracts us, or better yet the ramification, the serial multiplication of the same detail. There is an extreme promiscuity in pornography which decomposes the body into its most minute elements, the gestures into their most elemental movements. And our desire goes toward these new kinetic images which are also digital, fractal, artificial, and synthetic because they all have the least definition. One could even venture to say that they are all asexual, as in the case of porn images, because they suffer from an excess of truth and precision. But we are no longer looking for an imaginary wealth in these images; we are looking for the vertigo of their superficiality, the artifice of their detail, the intimacy of their technique. Our true desire is for their technique, their artifice, and nothing else. [Jean Baudrillard]

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions. [Angela Carter]

Certainly, porn has its uses: Like a pet dog, it can console the lonely; like oysters, it can sharpen a lover’s appetite; like cocoa, it can get the restless off to sleep. [Blake Morrison]

 

POSSESSION

First of all, we wil notice that throughout the ‘Paradox’ there is not a single description of the work of the actor that does not give a place, and a most rightful place, to inspiration. In other words, to a certain form of possession.
I will take the first example that presents itself:
“What acting was ever more perfect that Clairon’s? Nevertheless follow her, steady her, and you will find that at the sixth performance of a given part she has every detail of her acting by heart, just as much as every word of her part. Doubtless she has imagined a model, and to conform to this model has been her first thought; doubtless she has conceived the highest, the greatest, the most perfect model her imagination could compass. This model, however, which she has borrowed from history, or created as some vast spectre in her own mind, is not herself… When by dint of hard work, she has got as near as she can to this idea, the thing is done; to preserve the same nearness is a mer matter of memory and practice…
… once the struggle is over, once she has reached the height she has given to her spectre, she has herself well in hand, she repeats her effort without emotion. As it will happen in dreams, her head touches the clouds, her hands stretch to grasp the horizon on both sides.” [Diderot]
This torment, this struggle, this panting, all this work to construct the phantom (and almost give birth to it), to elaborate outside oneself – as an other – this mannequin that one can then inhabit in perfect security and confidence, in perfect mastery: it all results from being possessed or from a visitation (‘what I have got hold of… you cannot see’). The actor is not in a trance (where did Diderot ever make a serious apology for frenzy or confuse genius with manic delirium?); rather it is a kind of dream, a sign, as we know from the Salon of 1767 as well as from the Reve de d’Alembert, of unconscious work (or the work of the unconscious):
“It is not in the stress of the first burst that characteristic traits come out; it is i moments of stillness and self-command; in moments entirely unexpected. Who can tell where these traits have their being? They are a sort of inspiration. They come when the man of genius is hovering between nature and his sketch of it, and keeping a watchful eye on both. The beauty of inspiration, the chance hits of which his work is full, and of which the sudden appearance startles him, have an importance, a success, a sureness very different from the belonging to the first fling. Cool reflection must bring the fury of enthusiasm to its bearings.
Thus, nothing in inspiration is rejected, except frenzied possession. Whereas everything that appears in the form of self-possession, coolness, and mastery presupposes precisely a splitting of the self, an alteration, a being-outside-oneself; in short, alienation. Doubtless, when it is a question of execution or the actor’s performance, “the extravagant creature who loses his self-control has no hold on us.” But in the preparatory and creative work, in the construction of the character, things are quite different. When Clairon constructs her phantom, it “is not herself”; later, “following her memory’s dream”, she is able “to free herself, see herself, judge herself, and judge also the effects she will produce. In such a vision she is double: little Clairon and the great Aggrippina.” [Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe]

 

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism expresses at one level a horror at the destructive excess of western consumerist society, yet, in anaesthetizing this horror, we somehow convert it into a pleasurable object of consumption. [Elizabeth Wilson]

We are surrounded by emptiness, but it is an emptiness filled with signs. [Henri Lefebvre]

Disney land is there to conceal that fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. it is not longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. [Jean Baudrillard]

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. [Terry Eagleton]

The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it – it’s as immediate and as superficial as that. [Matthew Collings]

I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives. [Jean-François Lyotard]

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. [Jean-François Lyotard]

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. [Roland Barthes]

We live in quantified non-linear terms – we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream and so forth. We don’t live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did. [J.G. Ballard]

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, too, it seems to me, have been reversed. [J.G. Ballard]

For Hutcheon, postmodern architecture has an unequivocally ‘parodic relation to the art of the past.’ This is a supposedly critical – rather than merely parasitic – relationship: ‘it contests uniformity by parodically asserting ironic difference instead of either homogeneous identity or alienated otherness’… For her, there is a double aspect to postmodernist criticality in general: the return to the past (presumably the passive element in it), and the return to it in a parodic way (where the parodic is a way of avoiding sentimentality or directionless and speechless nostalgia, and is thus presumably the active element in it). The postmodernist return to the past is generally critical of modernism, with its presumed repudiation of the past. And the parodic relation to the past is particularly critical, for the return does not mean that one is taken in by the past, but rather that one maintains a ‘critical’ distance from it. And to what point? Hutcheon has nothing to say about this. Parody shows that one is not taken in by the past, not really sympathetic to it, and recognizes that it is not really ‘appropriate’ to the present. Then why bother with it?..
As Hutcheon presents them, both the return and its parody are superficial, gratuitous, seemingly self-reflexive acts of art… Both the ‘reaction’ and the ‘twist’ as she understands them seem to serve no purpose than to afford the postmodernist architect the narcissistic self-satisfaction of cleverly asserting ‘critical difference’ from the modernist architect. They are almost foreordained moves in the game of history… For all her insistence on the criticality of the return to history and the use of parody, she shows this trivial criticality as having no other point than to celebrate itself…
It never occurs to Hutcheon that there may be other reasons than aesthetically ingratiating, cannibalistic, didactic ones for returning to the past and establishing what she mistakenly interprets as a parodic relationship to it. In fact, hidden behind the self-importance of the parodic return to the past, there is an attempt to achieve some kind of intimate relationship to it, Postmodernist architecture attempts to appropriate the past not as a dead, over-aestheticized form but as a living, symbolic substance, charged with contemporary significance – which is the only way the past can remain viable. The return to the past is in effect a criticism of the present’s lack of integrity, and is in purpose motivated by an effort to recover that integrity in symbolic form. For authentic postmodernism, the past represents lost integrity, the ‘home’ the subject no longer inhabits but still yearns for, namely its own sanity and general good. The past is re-enacted less in the spirit of parody than of empathy, however incomplete. Pre-emptively to interpret the postmodernist appropriation of the past as parodic – a kind of witty ‘off’ parroting of it – is to ignore the latent empathic reasons for seeking out a relationship to it, trying to establish a kind of introspective relationship with it. That empathy may miss the full reality of that past – and may be a form of knowing mystification to some – but this reality always exists archaeologically, through its reified information-signs and ideal constructs. [Donald Kuspit]

In the postmodern world, it seems that history no longer provides identity or autonomy but is another commodity served up in television reruns, nostalgia, and endless repetition, so that instead of improving upon the work of previous generations, each new generation merely repeats it with only a slight variation. By repressing ‘material,’ history is reduced to a wardrobe, out of which we select each season’s costume…
Embedded in the postmodern sensibility, enfeebled by the multiplicity of formless forms and objects available for nameless utilizations, hidden in the current cynicism toward innovation, left behind in the rapid movement of social and technological advancement, is surely the great despair. History advances; it acts as though things can happen, and it takes action to make them happen. Despair, however, arrests. It is the despair that nothing will happen in the dismantling of time which Jean-François Lyotard suggests characterizes the postmodern. [Dorothea Olkowski-Laetz]

Our epoch is unpredictable because it is simultaneously complex and changing rapidly. This seems also to be the reason for the madness of our times. There is in no moment in the history of mankind when so many changes in so many different areas — social, political, economic, scientific, technological, sexual, and educational — have occurred. They are happening too fast for too many people. Madness is one way of coping. [Carl Sagan]

Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, formulates the distinction as that between an avant-garde mode which shows ‘nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything’ and the avant-garde mode which emphasizes ‘the power of the faculty [of presentation] to conceive, on its “inhumanity”, so to speak… whether or not human sensibility or imagination can match what it conceives’ (the mode of ‘invention of new rules of the game’). It is the difference between the mode of melancholy and the mode of deconstruction – between ‘the German Expressionists, and on the side of novatio, Braque and Picasso.’ Ever since Lyotard has made his distinction, it has been unthinkingly parrotted, until the melancholy mode has been understood to be naively compensatory – a typical Marxist diminishment of psychologically oriented art – and the deconstructivist mode elevated as the only critically significant, genuinely activist one. Nonetheless, Schulte-Sasse, who accepts the valorization of the polarity, has the courage to admit that even the ‘mode of deconstructive novatio’ may fall victim to the nostalgia of melancholy, namely, ‘mesmerizing fascination with what already exists, viewing it as the only epistemologicallly relevant object.’ This is a prelude to institutionalization, and indeed, as Schulte-Sasse acknowledges, the mode of deconstructive novation has become another institutionalized avant-garde discourse. What he fails to acknowledge is that in a situation of total administrative control of the avant-garde, correlate with a situation of bourgeois hypostatization of contradiction – which can be conceived in terms of T.W. Adorno’s notion of ‘hypermodernism’ – that is, a situation in which dissonance approximates to consonance or irreconcilability to reconciliation, the mode of melancholy may be more to the psychosocial point than the mode of deconstructive novatio. The latter mode plays into the hands of a bourgeois system which uses novelty to generate contradiction – which needs deconstruction to create the novelties that overthrow all that has hitherto been presented, thus establishing the convergence of permanent contradiction and permanent revolution. The psychosocial point made by the mode of melancholy is that of endurance in the face of an unendurable world – endurance, as Freud remarked, being the first obligation of the self to itself. ((Under circumstances of extreme social contradiction, the melancholy (lonely) integration of the self, assuming its endurance, can be a revolutionary act in itself. Endurance is most revolutionary when the world has become most banal, that is, banally contradictory and self-contradictory – priding itself on its bourgeois administration of its contradictions). No doubt this also turns into an obligation to the world. But so does the revolution-generating mode of decontruction, with its endlessly artificial novelties, which serve the world without offering any integration – however melancholy – that can resist it. In line with this, psychoanalytically speaking the deconstructivist mode looke like a manic defence for the avoidance of melancholy (sense of death, tragedy, negativity, chaos) which the Germans articulate through their Expressionistic mode. [?]

Whereas, in modernism, the typical modern experience that ‘all that is solid melts into the air,’ or ‘the centre does not hold,’ had prompted the creation of a ’subjective centre,’ an autonomous, self-defining artist, for postmodernism there is no centre at all, the subject itself is ‘de-centred,’ no longer an origin or source, but itself a result, a product of multiple social and psychological forces, all requiring a discourse much less tied to the interior monologues favoured by modernist novelists… Or, what modernism experienced as a great ‘loss’ of meaning, tradition, coherence, etc, is experienced by postmodernism as merely a shift or change, a ‘loss’ only under assumptions about High Culture, the primacy of the Western experience, or even the ‘metaphysics of presence’ that ought not to have been accepted in the first place. Or the endless self-reflexive and essentially bourgeois discourse of the modernists is replaced by the literature of silence (especially, say, Beckett), of ‘fragments or fractures, and a corresponding ideological commitment to minorities in politics, sex and language’…

If the central modern ethos, embodied in modernist architecture, was the idea of a self-sufficiency best realized by a functional rationality and control, the postmodern ethos was to express an ironic suspicion of such a podssibility and so its displacement in favour of historical finitude, multiples of order, and the rejection of a pretension to a unified, autonomous vision…

There is, on the one hand, a continuing Nietzschean suspicion about the intractable resistance of the ‘other,’ difference, or becoming to any rule or function, any ordering principle. Such ordering, especially in the service of the modern ideal of autonomy or self-sufficiency, is always a kind of violence or a will to power, a subjugation usually propelled by some interpretation of autonomy as control or domination… Totality, or holistic (and so ‘terroristic’) thinking of all forms is the enemy; a ‘pagan polytheism’ the new hero. We must respect instead the absolute (the new ‘absolute’) primacy of difference, the heterogeneity of language games, and so accept an ‘agonistics,’ a permanently unreconciled ‘play’ of opposition…
Moreover, Nietzsche was at least consistent enough, or sensitive enough to the idealist heritage, to doubt that it would ever be possible to identify, much less to respect or be ‘open’ to, ‘The Other In Itself’ (not to mention the residue of Christian ‘pity he would detect in such a sensibility). Such an Other, or the Different, or the identification of ‘our’ contingent community of interests, all would still be taken up within a perspective, and not one that could claim any ontological or post-historical authority. [Robert B.Pippin]

 

POWER

[The ambitious tyrant] doth like the ape that, the higher he clymbes, the more he shewes his ars. [Bacon]

A functioning police state needs no police. [William Burroughs]

Power, like a desolating pestilence
Pollutes whate’er it touches. [Shelley]

Since God has given us the Papacy let us enjoy it. [Leo X]

Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
Dennis: Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!… You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ‘cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! [Monty Python]

All sovereignty is absolute by nature. Whether it be placed on one or on several heads, whether it be divided, organize its powers how you will, there will always be in the last analysis an absolute power that will be able to do evil with impunity, that will thus be despotic from this point of view in the strongest sense of the term, and against which there will be no other rampart than that of insurrection. [Joseph de Maistre]

Sparta understood, with a clarity that set it apart from every other society of the ancient world, that the real enemy was the excess that is part of life. Lycurgus’s two ominous rules that foretell and frustrate any possible law merely dictate that no laws be written down and no luxury permitted. It is perhaps the most glaring demonstration of laconism the Spartans offer, always assuming we leave aside the grim moral precepts tradition has handed down to us. One can almost smell the malignant breath of the oracle in those dictates: forbidding writing and luxury was in itself enough to do away with everything that escaped the state’s control. [Roberto Calasso]

A compact democracy having the appearance of being founded on the dictatorship of the masses, but in which the masses have no more power than is necessary to ensure a general serfdom in accordance with the following precepts and principles borrowed from the old absolutism: indivisibility of public power, all-consuming centralization, systematic destruction of individual, corporative, and regional thought (regarded as disruptive), inquisitorial police. [Proudhon]

 

PRIDE

I used to say to myself, ‘What have you got to be proud about, Marilyn Monroe?’ And I’d answer, ‘Everything, everything,’ and I’d walk slowly and turn my head slowly as if I were a queen. [Marilyn Monroe]

He could stand at Picadilly Circus, could watch the crowds shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious, intelligent, individual being among all those thousands. It seemed, somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as elaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. [Aldous Huxley]

My senses tell me that the world is inhabited by a number of human individuals whom I can count and compare with each other, and I do not doubt the evidence of my senses. It requires, however, an act of faith on my part to believe that they enjoy a unique personal existence as I do, that when they say ‘I’ they mean what I mean when I say it, for this my senses cannot tell me. Vice versa, my own personal existence is to me self-evident; what, where I am concerned, calls for an act of faith, is to believe that I, too, am a human individual like the others, brought into the world by an act of sexual intercourse and exhibiting socially conditioned behaviour. The refusal to make this double act of faith constitutes the Primal Sin, the Sin of Pride. [W.H. Auden]

Attachment is no more or less than an insufficiency in our sense of reality. We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess, it will cease to exist. A great many people do not feel with their soul that there is all the difference in the world between the destruction of a town and their own irremediable exile from that town. [Simone Weil]

But men, miserable as they are, cling so to any thing like life, that they probably would prefer damnation to quiet. Besides, they think themselves so important in the creation, that nothing less can satisfy their pride – the insects! [Lord Byron]

There are two sorts of pride: one in which we cannot approve ourselves, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves. [Amiel]

Antigonos Gonatas, who on hearing himself described as a god retorted drily, ‘The man who empties my chamberpot has not noticed it.’ [E.R. Dodds, citing Plutarch]

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world. [E.M. Cioran]

 

PROBLEMS

‘My mind,’ [Holmes] said, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one I the world.’ [Arthur Conan Doyle]

The most damaging phrase in the language is: ‘It’s always been done that way.’ [Grace Hopper]

A problem is a mountain filled with treasure. [Chinese proverb]

If one finds a difficulty in a calculation which is otherwise quite convincing, one should not push the difficulty away; one should rather try to make it the centre of the whole thing. [Werner Heisenberg]

An expert problem solver must be endowed with two incompatible qualities, a restless imagination and a patient pertinacity. [Howard W. Eves]

Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you… [Arthur Conan Doyle]

The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it — it probably isn’t right. [Edmund C. Berkeley]

…the genuine solution of a difficult problem is neither more nor less than a glimpse of the wider context, a glimpse that helps us to clear away other difficulties as well, including many whose existence we do not even suspect. [Werner Heisenberg]

If a problem has less than three variables it is not a problem. If it has more than eight, you cannot solve it. [?]

My method to overcome a difficulty is to go round it. [George Polya]

A problem well stated is a problem half solved. [Charles F Kettering]

… there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing “messes” incapable of technical solution… [I]n the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern. [Donald A. Schön]

The value of a problem is not so much in coming up with the answer as in the ideas and attempted ideas it forces on the would-be solver. [I. N. Herstein]

There are many things you can do with problems besides solving them. First you must define them, pose them. But then of course you can also refine them, depose them, or expose them or even dissolve them! A given problem may send you looking for analogies, and some of these may lead you astray, suggesting new and different problems, related or not to the original. Ends and means can get reversed. You had a goal, but the means you found didn’t lead to it, so you found a new goal they did lead to. It’s called play. Creative mathematicians play a lot; around any problem really interesting they develop a whole cluster of analogies, of playthings. [D. Hawkins]

… most of our people suffer from the delusion that one can find a solution to every problem, if only one is clever enough; but there are insoluble problems. [Kautsky]

Any solution to a problem changes the problem. [R.W. Johnson]

Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they cause. [Karl Popper]

We only think when we are confronted with problems. [John Dewey]

… there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. [H.L. Mencken]

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem. [Theodor Adorno]

They point to a belief in the existence of what I would call a safe conduct to wisdom, a trust in methods and books and rules to lead to the solution of problems, to settle everything. Also a belief that there is only one solution, one way, one type of experience. [Artur Schnabel]

Some problems are just too complicated for rational logical solutions. They admit of insights, not answers. [Jerome Wiesner]

One should, after a fashion, welcome and esteem the difficulties one encounters. A difficulty is a lamp. An insuperable difficulty a sun. [Paul Valéry]

If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we’ve solved it. [Arthur Kasspe]

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. [Poul Anderson]

When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question? [Enrico Bombieri]

There are those who see social/economic/ecological problems as malfunctions which can be corrected by simple repair, replacement or streamlining – a kind of linear outlook where even innovations are considered to be merely additive. Then there are those who sometimes hesitate to move at all, because their awareness follows events in the directions of secondary and tertiary effects as they multiply and cross-fertilize throughout the entire system. [Roger Zelazny]

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals… the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. [Isaiah Berlin]

When a great many people agree that a problem is insignificant, that usually means it is not. Insignificance is the locus of true significance. [Roland Barthes]

Though the solution of a problem may flash into the mind of the person without his knowing how it arose, nevertheless he has always done a good bit of thinking, puzzling, wondering about it before the flash occurs. [George Boas]

To refer to those periods of time not taken up by contributing through work to society as ‘leisure’ is already to reveal a stance on what is really reckoned to be valuable – the occupied periods which leisure punctuates. It is already to think about men in the ways one does about non-human ingredients in the productive process, which also require their rest, their fallow time, before returning refitted, well-tuned, or relaxed to the real business… Inbued with technicism, too, is the ubiquitous reference to matters of concern, including moral ones, as ‘problems.’ Problems are what can be solved; insoluble ones being those, simply, which have not yet been worked hard enough upon. Problems have keys to unlock them, which the clever can find, and typically they have causes which, if operated on, get rid of them. to describe the anxieties and difficulties people encounter in their lives as ‘problems’ is already to be on a particular tack: that of looking for keys or causes, like unemployment or housing conditions or recreational facilities, to be operated on as the technician handles the snags and hitches he runs into. The thought that the anxieties or moral concerns may be part of the human condition, or the condition of technicist society itself, is conveniently suppressed. [David E. Cooper]

The existence of a well-defined problem does not imply the existence of a solution. [Gregory Benford]

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. [Albert Einstein]

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it. [Descartes]

With the tremendous success of instrumental reason in achieving technological control over the world, a conception of action as based on means-ends calculations became widely accepted. Through a formalisable procedure, it seems, we can work things over in order to achieve our goals. This capacity for strategic calculation and technical control was quite naturally expanded to include a psychotechnology for self-improvement. With the guidance of experts, we should be able to re-engineer our own lives according to a rational blueprint. Thus, one finds, in self-help programmes and popularised workshops, procedures of self-transformation described in a vocabulary of reworking the self to achieve particular ends – vocabulary of ’strengthening the ego,’ ‘restructuring cognitive strategies,’ ‘instilling hardiness,’ ‘learning coping skills,’ or ‘managing stress.’
What is most striking about this calculative-instrumentalist approach, of course, is its inability to reflect on the question of which ends are truly worth pursuing. Older views of life generally made a distinction between (1) ‘mere living,’ just functioning and satisfying needs, and (2) a ‘higher’ or ‘better’ form of existence that we could achieve if we realised our proper aim in life. In contrast, the modern naturalistic outlook tries to free itself from such a two-tiered view of life. The aims of living are now thought of either as the satisfaction of those basic needs distated by our biosocial makeup or as matters of personal preference. Psychotherapy, seen as a technique designed to help people attain their ends, remains indifferent to the ends themselves so long as they are realistic and consistent…
Given what has been called the ‘ontological individualism’ of modernity – the view that human reality is to be understood in terms of self-encapsulated individuals who are only contingently aggregated into social systems – a conflictual model of humans seems inevitable. When I see myself as a strategic calculator competing for limited resources, I tend to see others either as aids or as obstacles to my pursuits. Relationships are then experienced as temporary alliances entered into in order to secure our mutual benefit. The outcome is a kind of ‘therapeutic contractualism’ that treats marriage, friendships, and love relations as means to individual self-enhancement, that is, as contractual arrangements to be maintained only so long as I ‘continue to grow’ or ’still feel good about myself’ in the relationship’… [Charles B. Guignon]

A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts. [?]

Bachofen was “one of those men who see a problem in what is generally accepted as unproblematic. [George Boas]

 

PROFESSIONALS

Dilettant, dilettanti! Those who pursue a branch of knowledge or art for the love and enjoyment thereof, per il loro diletto, are disparagingly so called by those who take up such things for the sake of gain because they are attracted only by the money that is to be earned from them. This disparagement is due to their base conviction that no one will seriously tackle a thing unless he is spurred on by want, hunger, or some other keen desire. The public is of the same mind and thus of the same opinion; from this result its general respect for ‘professionals’ and its distrust of dilettanti. But the truth is that the dilettanti treats his subject as an end, whereas the professional as such treats his as a mere means. But a matter will be followed really seriously only by the man who is directly interested in it, is occupied with it out of pure love for it, and pursues it con amore. The greatest work has always come from such men, not from paid servants. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

Professionals are predictable, it’s the amateurs that are dangerous. [?]

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that… he is going to be a beginner all his life. [R.G. Collingwood]

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist. [George Bernard Shaw]

In all of us, the excited amateur has to die before the artist can be born. [F.H. Bradley]

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. [James Baldwin]

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect. [Georg Lichtenberg]

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. [Niels Bohr]

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them. [Werner Heisenberg]

One of the ever-present tendencies in men of highly trained intellect has been that of travestying the very discipline by which they live. [Roger Shattuck]

 

PROGRESS

The major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur. [A.N. Whitehead]

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life. [Ernest Renan]

To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind. [Peter Medawar]

If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea’s good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal. [E.M. Cioran]

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. [Havelock Ellis]

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. [Norbert Wiener]

All progress is based on a universal innate desire of every organism to live beyond its means. [Samuel Butler]

We cannot do without the notion of progress, yet it does not deserve our attention. It is like the ‘meaning’ of life. Life must have one. But is ther any which does not turn out, upon examination, to be ludicrous. [E.M. Cioran]

All advances in knowledge, from Galileo down to Freud and Marx, are, in the first impact, humiliating; they begin by showing us that we are not as free or as grand or as good as we thought; and it is only when we realise this that we can begin to study how to overcome our own weakness. [W.H. Auden]

There is no progress in art, any more than there is in making love. [Man Ray]