On not reading:
… what is interesting about a text – which is not the work itself but the qualities it shares with others – might be best perceived by a critic who closes his eyes in the presence of the work and thinks, instead, about what it may be. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (29)
There was a time when I read books in, shall we say, the romantic manner, which is to mean all the way through and usually in one sitting. I had, at one time, an enormous patience for spending hour upon hour with a single text; on rainy days, I sometimes still do. But more often than not, I read a dozen books or more at once, flitting from one to the other, looking for the connections, finding the spaces between them where I can inhabit safely. This is one way of “not reading” which Bayard rescues and promotes, in that it rejects the singular book in favor of the entire library. And, perhaps more importantly, it recognizes that to lose oneself in another’s work is to fail to make a work of your own: only by pushing books away does the writer find her voice.
At its root, this is a vision of reading couched in discontent. It is discontent – or, more completely, a sense that any given text is insufficient – that makes us close the book at hand and tilt our head back in thought. What resides on the page is often just a catalyst for further thinking (or writing). It’s what feeds the culture around books – for a book that is never talked about is like the tree that falls in the forest: it leaves behind no evidence that it ever made a sound.
How ideology is like a park bench:
Ideology … is not just a matter of what I think about a situation; it is somehow inscribed in that situation itself. It is no good my reminding myself that I am opposed to racism as I sit down on a park bench marked ‘Whites Only’; by the act of sitting on it, I have supported and perpetuated racist ideology. The ideology, so to speak, is in the bench; not in my head. Eagleton, Ideology (40)
A lovely side benefit to this analogy is the solidification of ideology. In Eagleton’s hands, ideology becomes a heavy object of iron and wood. You don’t carry it with you so much as look for it when you need to rest.
Macro- versus microtypography:
While macrotypography – the typographic layout – is concerned with the format of the printed matter, with the size and position of the columns of text and illustrations, with the organization of the hierarchy of headings, subheadings and captions, detail typography is concerned with the individual components – letters, letterspacing, words, wordspacing, lines and linespacing, columns of text. These are the components that graphic or typographic designers like to neglect, as they fall outside the area that is normally regarded as ‘creative.’ Hochuli, Detail in typography (7)
A well-designed text will seem weightless after a time; the initial feel of the book fades away as the mind becomes engrossed in the words. Any shiver in the page – a bad break, a too-long measure, a space too wide or narrow – and the book will press into the reader’s hand and tug at the lids of her eyes. It takes a designer who is also a reader to be be attentive to the ways by which the page becomes a burden to the words.
Getting back to the nature of truth:
Moral judgements are as much candidates for rational argumentation as are the more obviously descriptive parts of our speech. For a realist, such normative statements purport to describe what is the case: these are ‘moral facts’ as well as physical ones, about which our judgements can be said to be either true or false. The Jews are inferior beings is quite as false as that Paris is the capital of Afghanistan; it isn’t just a question of my private opinion or of some ethical posture I decide to assume towards the world. To declare that South Africa is a racist society is not just a more imposing way of saying that I happen not to like the set-up in South Africa. Eagleton, Ideology (17)
Eagleton has this endearing metaphorical tick in his language: he reaches for a metaphor to illuminate a concept, and then reaches – again – for another example, just to make sure you really got it. In the wrong hands this could read like a stutter – awkward, self-consciously repetitive. But Eagleton’s sense of rhythm is so acute that it comes off like a rimshot instead. (Sometimes literally so – often the second metaphor is a Jon Stewart-esque jab.)
On the difference between conservatives and liberals, or, why conservatives lie through their teeth while liberals expect the truth to surface:
It is a typically conservative estimate of human beings to see them as sunk in irrational prejudice, incapable of reasoning coherently; and it is a more radical attitude to hold that while we may indeed be afflicted by all sorts of mystifications, some of which might even be endemic to the mind itself, we nevertheless have some capacity for making sense of our world in a moderately cogent way. If human beings really were gullible and benighted enough to place their faith in great numbers in ideas which were utterly devoid of meaning, then we might reasonably ask whether such people were worth politically supporting at all. If they are that credulous, how could they ever hope to emancipate themselves? Eagleton, Ideology (12)
This could less charitably be referred to as the difference between authoritarianism and democracy. I intend to continue to pitch my tent with the radicals.
Definitions:
‘Criticism’, in its Enlightenment sense, consists in recounting to someone what is awry with their situation, from an external, perhaps ‘transcendental’ vantage-point. ‘Critique’ is that form of discourse which seeks to inhabit the experience of the subject from the inside, in order to elicit those ‘valid’ features of that experience which point beyond the subject’s present condition. ‘Criticism’ instructs currently innumerate men and women that the acquisition of mathematical knowledge is an excellent cultural goal; ‘critique’ recognizes that they will achieve such knowledge quickly enough if their wage packets are at stake. Eagleton, Ideology (xxiii)
In other words, from-the-heavens versus on-the-ground. In reality I think the division here is often less clear-cut, but I won’t argue with a good metaphor.
On postmodernism, politics, plastic surgery, and the serendipity of a good metaphor:
[The current administration’s] disdain for anything as prosaic as reality also aligns it, rather oddly, with postmodern culture, for which reality – rather like the body in the cosmetic surgeon’s operating theatre – is pliable stuff to be moulded into whatever shapes you fancy, not recalcitrant material that thwarts your attempts to mould it. Eagleton, Ideology (xv)
On words
When language is undeniably beautiful, the beauty is evidence of the truth of the words.
There are many writers capable of composing phrases which, at first glance, seem beautiful. They are like plastic surgeons who excel at temporary beauty — that which lives and dies in the glimpse. A long, hard look destroys them both.
A writer who knows her words are beautiful will yet harbor doubts; accuse her of ugly writing and you will be met with silence. But direct the same accusation to a writer who knows the shallowness of his words and he will viciously protest. The depth of the protest is a measure of the truth of the claim.
In defense of truth:
Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying. Each statement, each piece of news, each thought has been pre-formed by the centres of the culture industry. … The extreme case of Germany is instructive of the general mechanism. When the National Socialists began to torture, they not only terrorized people inside and outside Germany, but were they more secure from exposure the more wildly the horror increased. The implausibility of their actions made it easy to disbelieve what nobody, for the sake of precious peace, wanted to believe, while at the same time capitulating to it. Adorno, Minima Moralia (108)
And:
The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no-one can say whether he died or escaped, survives. Ibid. (109)
I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the timeliness of this post. I will say that it’s taking me an inordinate amount of time to get through Minima Moralia, not because it’s difficult (which it is) but because it’s so utterly damning. I keep pausing to survey the territory around me, somewhat surprised to find I’m still standing amid the ruins.
More on process:
The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling every reader to follow the process through, and, where possible – in the academic industry – to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. For the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. Adorno, Minima Moralia (80)
There’s a certain amount of alchemy to writing that ought not to be expunged. It’s tempting to try to sort it out (a temptation I am often prone to), but in the sorting you’ll inevitably lose the whole.