I’ve neglected the blog all term because I’ve been so busy with coursework, and most of what I’ve been writing–critical commentaries on seminar readings–wouldn’t make for particularly interesting posts (though two pieces from a particularly unusual course will eventually make it up here in some form). But the readings themselves have been remarkably engaging, and since I’ve been keeping commonplace books since before I knew that’s what they were called, I thought I’d make one out of some gleanings from my copious files of notes. These are a scattering of lines from some–by no means all!–of the books and articles I read for my three seminars: everything’s straight from the syllabi. Dates of publication range from 1956 to last year.
“Nuer say that the stomach prays to God independently of the heart.” E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion
“We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. And, yet, the word things holds within it a more audacious ambiguity.” Bill Brown, “Thing Theory”
“The edifice of the modern state had the emblem of death at its hollow center.” Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico
“In our culture, saying that knowledge is artifactual and conventional is tantamount to saying that it is not authentic knowledge at all.” Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
“Here’s what I think: that mana expresses a sense of bodily consciousness writ large into cosmic consciousness; that such bodily consciousness is actually more like an unconscious, what might be called the ‘wisdom of the body’ or the body’s self-regulating autonomic system; that so-called primitive societies created a magnificent theater of ritual and magic out of the network connecting this unconscious ‘wisdom of the body’ with the cosmos at large. Hence while weather talk today retains some inklings of mana, the mystical and magical meanings have been eviscerated, the theater has been gutted, and the magic turned to pap because the cosmic frame of reference binding us to the natural world now barely exists.” Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum
“The creation of culture media is just as much a historical event for the microbe as it is for the Pasteurians.” Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France
“In the interests of state power and development, not only the technologies and institutions of western capitalism, but hundreds of years of aesthetic theories, literary forms, and modes of representation were imported within an extraordinarily compressed span of time: not only railroads, but Descartes; not only finance capital, but Renaissance perspective; not only Prussian-style militarism, but Ibsen.” Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
“The nuclear bomb is literally an explosive and an explosive cosmological practice, a world-making enterprise that can reorganize how people experience everyday life.” Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico
“To live is to attach value to life’s purposes and experiences; it is to prefer certain methods, circumstances, and directions to others. Life is the opposite of indifference to one’s surroundings. ” Georges Canguilhem, “Epistemology of Biology”
“The widest community of Ndembu is therefore a community of suffering.” Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society
“…as we now know, while the malaria campaign used the new power of DDT, the pesticide had purposes of its own, well beyond the intentions of the research chemists and the eradication teams.” Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (from the delightfully-titled chapter “Can the Mosquito Speak?”)
“Myth and ritual is a language of signs in terms of which claims to rights and status are expressed, but it is a language of argument, not a chorus of harmony.” Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure
“Perversion is a thoroughly modern phenomenon.” Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts
“Marx’s overcoat was to go in and out of the pawnshop throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. And his overcoat directly determined what work he could or could not do. If his overcoat was at the pawnshop during the winter, he could not go to the British Museum. If he could not go to the British Museum, he could not undertake the research for Capital. What clothes Marx wore thus shaped what he wrote. There is a level of vulgar material determination here that is hard even to contemplate. And yet vulgar material determinations were precisely what Marx contemplated, and the whole first chapter of Capital traces the migrations of a coat as a commodity within the capitalist marketplace.” Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat” (in Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces)
“Science abhors a marvel, not because marvels are vacuous, empty of meaning, but because they are too full of meaning.” Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory
“Apotropaic patterns are demon-traps, in effect, demonic fly-paper, in which demons become hopelessly stuck, and are thus rendered harmless.” Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory
“Whether understood as the view from nowhere or as algorithmic rule-following, whether praised as the soul of scientific integrity or blamed as soulless detachment from all that is human, objectivity is assumed to be abstract, timeless, and monolithic. But if it is a pure concept, it is less like a bronze sculpture cast from a single model than like some improvised contraption soldered together out of mismatched parts of bicycles, alarm clocks, and steam pipes.” -Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity
3 Comments
May 17, 2009 at 3:43 pm
oh, how i envy you all this book-learning and reading. those were the days….I am going through Objectivity of late, so thats a nice coincidence.
May 17, 2009 at 9:09 pm
[...] spring semester commonplace book « verbal privilege [...]
May 17, 2009 at 10:37 pm
sepoy yaar, I could have done with a little less course-book and a little more my-book (my own fault for taking too many courses, tho.) But yes, these are indeed the days; hence the temptation to taste it all.
and tell me what you think of Objectivity–I thought it was very good, but then, I am a sucker for good writing, and pretty color-plate pictures.