#narrative.authority

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“Truth is a fog in which people see what they want to see.”

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‘Everything,’ said K., who had regained his composure listening. ‘’Everything that you say is in a certain sense justifiable, it is not untrue, it is only partisan. These are the landlady’s ideas, my enemy’s ideas, even if you imagine that they’re your own.’ — p. 151

‘He ought long ago to have had, not a uniform, for there aren’t many in the Castle, but a suit provided by the department, and he has been promised one, but in things of that kind the Castle moves slowly, and the worst of it is that one never knows what this slowness means; it can mean that the matter's being considered, but it can also mean that it hasn’t yet been taken up, that Barnabas for instance is still on probation, and in the long run it can also mean that the whole thing has been settled, that for some reason or other the promise has been cancelled, and that Barnabas will never get his suit. One can never find out exactly what is happening, or only a long time afterwards. We have a saying here, perhaps you've heard it: Official decisions are as shy as young girls.’ (p. 164 and all of these scenarios are true and false; cf. Schrodinger)

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Narrative authority

Hegel suggested that societies become modern “when news replaces religion as out central source of guidance and our touchstone of authority” (ii, 31)

“The news may present itself as the authoritative portraitist of reality [...] but it has no overarching ability to transcribe reality. It merely selectively fashions reality through the choices it makes”. (43)

Black and white and re(a)d all over

“In its stoking of our fears, the news cruelly exploits our weak hold on a sense of perspective. (49, my paintings have no narrative or spatial perspective)

News photography comprises images of corroboration and revelation. (111)

Linguistic turn and revival of narrative in history writing

“These writers know that no event, however shocking, can ever guarantee involvment; for this latter prize, they must work harder, practising their distinctive craft, which means paying attention to language, alighting on animating details and keeping a tight rein on pace and structure. In certain situations, creative writers may even choose to sacrifice strict accuracy”. (82)

“[George] Eliot went on to note, ‘Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics require a sympathy readymade...; but a picture of human life such as an artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment’.” (86)

The Wicked Bible

“The only honest purpose of unearthing and publicising error is to make it less prevalent. (65)

Quotes

Gustave Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas. “The news had [...] armed stupidity and given authority to fools”. (70)

William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

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“That is why I consider those developments in physics... 

...during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are a great liberation of thought.

[...]

Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation. To that extent, every physical process may be said to have objective and subjective features.

Re: relativity and complementarity in classical and quantum physics, respectively.

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“What kind of pillar is the letter I?”

“When I flip open a story collection or literary magazine, my eye expects to settle on a paragraph liberally girded with that little pillar of self.” 

“The 'I' whose voice is heard in the lyric is an 'I' that define and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to objectivity; it is not immediately at one with the nature to which its expression refers.” — Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, In Reading Cy Twombly 165

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“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.”

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Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”

Deals with “the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it” (205)

What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list; is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? (207)

Cf. Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author:

it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself. The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality. (208)

we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers. (209)

Proposes the ‘author function’ to fill(?) this space.

the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. 

[...] 

As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there area certain number of discourses endowed with the "author function" while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor – it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has an editor – but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society. (211)

The text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author. These signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author function as in those lacking it. [...] Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator's account, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. [...] In fact, however, all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self (215)

Analysis of this kind would also “reexamine the privileges [and agency] of the subject” (22)

one must return to this question, not in order to reestablish the theme of an originating subject but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies. [...] How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse. (220-1)

the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. (221)

What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? (222)

Thought a lot about Scwhabsky’s Object or Project.

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Adam O’Fallon Price, “In Defense of Third Person”

First person [...] contains a contrivance central to its character that third person does not: audience. In first person, someone is addressing someone else, but absent narrative framing to position these someones  […] we find ourselves in an inherently ambiguous space: to whom, exactly, is this person talking, and why?  The uncertainty of this space, I would argue, is largely filled, intentionally or not, by the voice of the narrator, its presence and authority. Even if this narrator declaims her own uncertainty, she declaims it with certainty, and she declaims it toward an imagined audience, in a speaker/listener relationship. (¶7)

A third-person narrative […] is a thing to be inspected by the reader.  It is, in a sense, a closed system (¶8)

The other common objection to third-person narration, and by proxy an argument for first person, also concerns the artificiality of the third person narrator, not in artistic but rather, experiential terms.  This is the second prong of the naturalist argument: it isn’t a thing that exists.  No one walks into a room and thinks of themselves, “he walked into a room.”  Also, no one simply watches other people walk into a room without being aware of their own frame of reference.

[…]

While no one walks into a room and thinks, “he walks into a room,” it can be asserted with even greater force that no one walks into a room and thinks, “I walk into a room.”  […]  The experience of being a human is, in fact, an experience of dual consciousness […] an endless negotiation of the immediate, subjective perspective, and the greater objective context. (¶10-11)

See also: “Chronicling Life’s White Machine” on The Millions and Tumblr