Off-White Noise

Ecotheory & Fiction Andgorman.wordpress.com

[literary-structures]

“Still, I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college any more, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader – the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it.”

— Zadie Smith: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (p. 56)

[lovevoltaireusapart]

“Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.”

— Walter Benjamin, paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”

[fish-b]

“For me, Derrida’s philosophical exemplarity consists in the lesson of reading: patient, meticulous, scrupulous, open, questioning reading that is able, at its best, to unsettle its readers’ expectations and completely transform our understanding of the philosopher in question. Because Derrida was such a brilliant reader, he is a difficult example to follow, but in my view one must try. This is what I would see as the pedagogical imperative deriving from Derrida’s work. What one is trying to cultivate with students—in seminars, week in, week out—is a scrupulous practice of reading, being attentive to the text’s language, major arguments, transitions and movements of thought, but also alive to its hesitations, paradoxes, quotation marks, ellipses, footnotes, inconsistencies and downright conceptual confusions. Thanks to Derrida, we can see that every major text in the history of philosophy possesses these self-deconstructive features. Deconstruction is pedagogy.”

— Simon Critchley, “Derrida’s Influence on Philosophy… and on My Work” (via ecrituria)

[sickfuture]

[off-whitenoise]

What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those communities that are involuntarily (and often militarily) relocated to less hospitable  environs, but also those affected by what I call displacement without moving. In other words, I want to propose a more radical notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable.

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

[off-whitenoise]

Maybe it's the writer's weakness, always trying to distill history into simple stories about a single person, a fight, an invention, a small act of civil disobedience.  That is why we often say World War 1 was triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Or that the American civil rights movement was prompted by Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat. Perhaps that's also why I felt compelled to seek the true origins of the fortune cookie--whether the creator turned out to be a noodle-maker in Los Angeles or a gardener from Japan. We want a person behind the phenomenon. These symbolic characters make the mess of history more streamlines, palatable, and digestible--not unlike American Chinese food. Against the backdrop of chaos, there is a single pleasant narrative.

Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles 

[aworldfullyalive]

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (via cyborgianheart)

[theperksofbeingabookseller]

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature (via theperksofbeingabookseller)

[fuckyeahdialectics]

Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. And whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns. He will learn what he wants, nothing maybe.

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (via heteroglossia)

[heteroglossia]

Derrida is hard to read; his real object of investigation is classical philosophy. Yet he is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (via heteroglossia)

[ludimagister-deactivated2017063]

Concepts are not labels or names that we attach to things; they produce an orientation or a direction for thinking.

Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (via ludimagister)

[ludimagister-deactivated2017063]

The modes of thinking such as art, science, and philosophy are not just idle cognitions or reflections; they are the very medium through which we become.

Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (via ludimagister)

[off-whitenoise]

Money has now found its proper place, a place far more wondrous than the stock exchange: the orbit in which it rises and sets like some artificial sun.

Jean Baudrillard,  “Transeconomics”

[alcyere]

[nord-milk]

^^I/\/\III (by 6line8)

[poetsandwriters]

Things that are your obstacles often turn out not to be. Things you think are stopping you from writing, these distractions, can feed into your work in positive ways. You just may not know it yet. Things you don’t want to discuss—your scars, your shadows, your psychological baggage from childhood. It’s useful. It’s therapeutic to deploy them. You kind of win by using them. You can give them a right to exist but actually give them a job to do as an informant about reality, about language, about the human heart. Then that will make you the writer that you will be, or you’re going to be, or are, in fact, becoming.

David Mitchell (Lithub, 2015)

[off-whitenoise]

We live in Morning Glory, a coal town hacked with sharp blades out of a forest that threatened always to take it back.  The hickories encroached on the town, springing up unbidden in the middle of dog pens and front yards and the cemetery. The creeping vines for which the town was named drew themselves along the wire fences yo the sides of houses with the persistence of the displaced.  I have heard  it said that if a man stood still in Morning Glory, he would be tied down by vines and not found until first frost.  Even the earth underneath us sometimes moved to repossess its losses: the long, deep shafts that men opened to rob the coal veins would close themselves up again, as quietly as flesh wounds

Barbara Kingsolver, “Homeland”

[off-whitenoise]

Saying sorry for a past that is not our own is one way of acknowledging that while we may not have made the decision for which we are asking forgiveness, we are nevertheless contaminated by and indebted to the archive in which acts of violence have been inscribed.

Claire Colebrook, Bourgeois Thermodynamics