[homage to S.S.]
At the end of her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag included 'A brief anthology of quotations', subtitled (in square brackets) 'Homage to W.B'. W.B. is Walter Benjamin, whose foundational Arcades Project consists almost entirely of quotations and excerpts from historical works.
“The scheme of intelligibility on which we fundamentally rely is not adequate, is not common, and closes us off from the possibility of understanding others and ourselves in a more fundamentally capacious way.”
“C'est une étrange chose que l'écriture.”
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, 'Leçon d'écriture', Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Librarie Plon 1955, p 352what's wrong with writing?
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what's wrong with writing? >>>
“When a scholar knows that his associates are unlikely to judge the quality of his work by reading it directly, he will seek to publish frequently, in hopes of making at least the length of his publications list impressive.”
— David M Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science. Politics, scholarship and democracy, New Haven: Yale UP, 1984, p 223“A man sitting alone in his personal library reading is at once the product and begetter of a particular social and moral order. It is a bourgeois order founded on certain hierarchies of literacy, of purchasing power, of leisure and of caste... The classic act of reading... is the focus of a number of implicit power relations between the educated and the menial, between the leisured and the exhausted, between space and crowding, between silence and noise, between the sexes and the generations.”
— George Steiner, 'After the Book?' in On Difficulty and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980, cit Nicholas Thoburn, Anti-Book. On the art and politics of radical publishing, Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2016, p 46“We can only understand where texts come from – in terms of their authorship and social contexts as well as their content and textual organization - by careful tracing of their histories.”
— Paul Prior, 'Tracing process: how texts come into being', in Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior (eds) What Writing Does and How it Does It. An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices, New York: Routledge, 2004, pp 196-07“The way people write grows out of the social situations they write in. So we need to see how social organization creates the classic problems of scholarly writing: style, organization, and the rest.”
— Howard Becker, Writing for Social Scientists, Chicago: U Chicago P, p xiwe are not alone
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we are not alone <<<
“Two of the statements are particularly important: number 7: 'Art writing is an anthology of examples'; and number 8: 'Art writing is reinvented in each instance of art writing, determining its own criteria.' I think those two are essential.”
— Maria Fusco, in Chris Sharratt, Writing as a Visible Practice: An Interview with Maria Fusco, Art & Education, November 2018; Maria Fusco, '11 statements around art writing', Frieze, 10 October 2011“This is a narrative essay, the animating purpose of which is stylistic as much as analytic. It is a story; and, unusually for academic geography, the story is primary. The essay has no deferred object; it is not ‘about’ something more academic but nor does it abrogate the work of analysis. It narrates the story of the Scottish archaeologist Erskine Beveridge and his family, as told through a prolonged encounter with the ruins of his house situated on the Hebridean island of North Uist. A discussion of ruins, archives and fieldwork runs parallel with, but always subsidiary to, the main narrative.”
— Fraser MacDonald, 'The ruins of Erskine Beveridge', Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society 2014 39 477–489“‘What is your word?’ This is one of the main questions with which the editors open this book, as they try to make sense, dialogically, of what writing differently is about. Alison Pullen talks about activism, co-operation, trust, collaborative participation, gratitude as well as about the ethics and normalizing risks of evaluating work written differently. Jenny Helin talks about the importance of reading and writing, slowly, in a culture of fastness and instrumentality; about writing differently as an invitation to enter others’ lives as readers. Nancy Harding talks about writing differently as a micro-revolution: an effort to transcend the boundaries of academic rigour and redefine it through a writing produced by organic interpretations of life happenstances.”
— Emmanouela Mandalaki, review of Alison Pullen, Jenny Helin and Nancy Harding (eds) Writing Differently, Dialogues in Critical Management Studies, Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, 2020, in Organization Studies 42 (10) 1668-9“Management and organization studies confront a world that is, and will remain, polyphonic and polysemic. The uneasy task of organization scholars is to render this state of affairs in our texts, which requires a skilful balance between centripetal and centrifugal textual moves.”
— Barbara Czarniawska, Writing Management. Organization theory as a literary genre, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999, p 112writing, knowing & being
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writing, knowing & being >>>
“Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller... What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences, because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that follows. Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and 'makes' the story.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, New York: Doubleday, 1959“I do not know what I think until I have tried to write it. Sometimes the purpose of writing is to discover whether I can express what I think I know; if it cannot be written, it is not right. Other times I write to find out what I know; writing becomes a form of self-discovery. I always hope to learn more than was in me when I started; few feelings compare with the exhilaration of discovering a thought in the writing that was not in the thinking…
…The imposition of order on recalcitrant material, which we optimistically call knowledge, is a sometimes thing, hard won, temporary, and artificial, like the rest of civilisation.”
— Aaron Wildavsky, 'Rationality in writing, linear and curvilinear', in Craftways. On the organization of scholarly work, second edition, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993, p 9, p 13“Why should students of politics turn to literature as a source of political understanding?... Literature disturbs a dependence on reason and rationality; it expands the concept of ‘reality’; it enlarges the vocabulary of politics; politically relevant themes and issues can be brought into politics - ‘tragedy’, ‘violence’ and ‘evil’, for instance. Literature directs attention to ‘other’ and otherness; it provides the occasion for reflection or meditation; the imaginative contemplation of political possibilities, political speculation, is facilitated by reading literature. Literature’s combination of form and content offers political theory fresh understanding of (dis)order and ‘negativities’. Literature’s complexity allows a sense of perspective. Literature both ‘puts politics in its place’ and transgresses the boundaries of what is defined as political. Literature directs attention to the moral dilemmas of politics, the ethical dimensions of political action, and the significance of the individual in politics. In practical terms, literature offers a way into teaching, and stimulus for research, not only in political theory but in political science as well - political sociology, area studies, the politics of race and gender, for example.”
— Maureen Whitebrook, 'Politics and Literature?', Politics (1995) 15 (1) 55-62; p 55, p 60“Shortly after 9/11, the Defense Department hired Renny Harlin, the writer-director of Die Hard 2, to game-plan potential doomsday scenarios; in other words, fiction got called to the official aid, reinforcement, and rescue of real life, as if real life weren't always fiction in the first place.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger. A manifesto, London: Penguin, 2010, §251, p 85“Under the rubric 'poets' politics', we don't mean the opinions, experiences and political involvements of this or that poet; nor do we mean the reception or political interpretation of this or that text. The question that interests us here is the following: what essential necessity links the modern stance of poetic utterance with that of political subjectivity? ...The question can be posed thus: isn't a new form of political experience necessary to emancipate the lyrical subject from the old poetic-political framework?”
— Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words. The politics of writing, Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 2004, pp9-10“What you write about and how you write it shapes your life, shapes who you become.”
— Laurel Richardson, ' Getting personal: writing-stories', Qualitative Studies in Education, 2001, VOL. 14, NO. 1, 33–38 , p 36the form of the book
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the form of the book <<<
“True literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework; this is rather the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book – in leaflets, brochures, articles and placards.”
— Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, 1928“The book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.”
— Walter Benjamin, ‘Attested auditor of books’, One Way-Street, 1928My claim is that the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean.
— N Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, p 25“From the looks of it, most writing proceeds as if the internet had never happened... With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography.”
— Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing. Managing language in the digital age, New York: Columbia UP, 2011, p 6, p 14crossing boundaries
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crossing boundaries >>>
“For the Passagenwerk to be of use… it would be necessary… to remember the value of experimentation, the importance of interdisciplinarity, the breaking down of the distinctions not just between philosophy, history, literary criticism and cultural analysis, but also between art and criticism, not for the sake of the new, but of social change and transformation.”
— Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 1994“Writing that collapses the creative and the critical into a single text is called many things and, increasingly, it is called fictocriticism.”
— Sarah Gory, 'In communion: art/writing and the fictocritical', in Brad Haylock and Megan Patty, Art Writing in Crisis, London: Sternberg Press, 2021, p134“Fictocriticism was never a genre that was One. And still isn't. Not so much a genre as an accident, even a hit and run - or perhaps precisely a hit and run guerilla action, tactical rather than strategic. A precise intervention into a specific situation, fictocriticism is not iterable, surprise being of the essence, and no two impasses in writing or debate are ever exactly the same. Fictocriticism therefore does not illustrate an already existing argument, does not simply formulate philosophy (or anything else) in fictional terms. It is not translation or transposition: it says something which can't be said in any other way: because it is not reducible to propositional content. It is, in essence, performative, a meta-discourse in which the strategies of the telling are part of the point of the tale. It is a mode of writing which pays particular attention to questions of address, even as it knows, with Barthes, that 'one does not write for the other':”
— Anna Gibbs, 'Bodies of words: feminism and fictocriticism - explanation and demonstration', TEXT 1 (2) October 1997late style
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late style <<<
“Among recent generations of anthropologists, the new 'classics', particular anthropologies that come to be received as tokens of an idealized image of what the practice of anthropology should exemplify, derive primarily from writing in reaction to the initiatory training experience... Often, the most interesting writers in anthropology are those who, while continuing to invoke ethnographic authority and to work through ethnographic detail in their writing, never try to reproduce the kind of text they wrote in response to training, but rather attempt to explore lessons gained from that experience, which requires different forms and styles of exposition.”
— George Marcus, 'Afterword: Ethnographic writing and anthropological careers', in James Clifford and George E Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. The poetics and politics of ethnography, Berkeley: U California P, 1986; pp 265-266“Experimental approaches within academia do seem to be the choice and preserve of the established academic who’s already covered the traditional monograph and article ground...the younger academic remains within the established structures of writing and publishing that build a career.”
— Philip Carter, Royal Historical Society, in Matthew Reisz, 'Is the future of history writing in the first person?', Times Higher Education, 3 June 2021writing differently
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writing differently >>>
“Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial.”
— Brian Dillon, Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017, p 12“I write not as a trusted guide carefully laying out the links between theoretical categories and the real world, but as a point of impact, curiosity and encounter. I call myself 'she' to mark the difference between this writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence. 'She' is not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive as a point of contact; instead, she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer.”
— Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Durham NCL Duke UP, 2007, p 5“It is quite feasible to start reading a text at a different point from the top left.”
— Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, trans Ruari McLean, Berkeley: U California P, 1998 [1928], p 67“No one can agree on what a sentence is.”
— Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence, London: Penguin, 2018, p 5“What we must do, then, is look at the effects of a story, at what the story does. How does it work? What is its impact on the world? Does it have the double effect Rancière describes: does it both make some sort of political sense and produce a shock to sense from the way it resists meaning? Does it make productive political use of the way concepts in language do not hold? Or does it serve to conceal that inevitable fragility – 'to gentrify the properly traumatic dimension of the political' (Žižek) – a concealment that is also highly political?”
— Jenny Edkins (2013) 'Novel Writing in International Relations: openings for a creative practice', Security Dialogue 44 (4) 281-297; p 286who for?
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who for? <<<
“For whom am I there when I write? That is the political question of a society dominated by writing: in such a society, the truly political gesture is to write and publish texts. All other political engagement follows from and submits to texts.”
— Vilém Flusser, Does Writing have a Future?, Minneapolis: U Minnestota P, 2011 [1987], p 40“We write first for ourselves, for a more secure sense of ourselves, so as to hold steady a bit more of experience, so as to feel less swayed all ways by the flow of experience. It is here that ‘the others’ come in, this time with more importance. Most of us would hate finally to feel alone. That, too, is part of the emptiness of experience. So it becomes part of the purpose of writing to close that emptiness a bit, to feel more securely — past simple assertions or crying down the wind — that we are not alone. We hope that this effort, this sort of exploring, will help us reach more convincing ways of speaking to each other. It is therefore true in the end to say that part of the purpose of writing is to reach others: not to sell them anything or persuade them, but to be quite simply in touch. It follows that we best speak to others when we forget them and concentrate on trying to be straight towards our experience, in the hope that honestly seen experience becomes exchangeable.”
— Richard Hoggart, ‘Talking to yourself’, Only Connect, BBC Reith Lectures 1971