One who offers the participants arenas in which to gather

“The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing. Not westward, but, so to speak, eastward.”

(page 236)

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” In Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004), Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Read (in English) for a class (in German) on Installation, UdK-Berlin.

Things that gather cannot be thrown at you like objects

“[T]he crucial point for me now is that what allowed historians, philosophers, humanists, and critics to trace the difference between modern and premodern, namely, the sudden and somewhat miraculous appearance of matters of fact, is now thrown into doubt with the merging of matters of fact into highly complex, historically situated, richly diverse matters of concern. You can do one sort of thing with mugs, jugs, rocks, swans, cats, mats but not with Einstein’s Patent Bureau electric coordination of clocks in Bern. Things that gather cannot be thrown at you like objects.
And, yet, I know full well that this is not enough because, no matter what we do, when we try to reconnect scientific objects with their aura, their crown, their web of associations, when we accompany them back to their gathering, we always appear to weaken them, not to strengthen their claim to reality. I know, I know, we are acting with the best intentions in the world, we want to add reality to scientific objects, but, inevitably, through a sort of tragic bias, we seem always to be subtracting some bit from it. Like a clumsy waiter setting plates on a slanted table, every nice dish slides down and crashes on the ground. Why can we never discover the same stubborn- ness, the same solid realism by bringing out the obviously webby, “thingy” qualities of matters of concern? Why can’t we ever counteract the claim of realists that only a fare of matters of fact can satisfy their appetite and that matters of concern are much like nouvelle cuisine—nice to look at but not fit for voracious appetites?
One reason is of course the position objects have been given in most social sciences, a position that is so ridiculously useless that if it is employed, even in a small way, for dealing with science, technology, religion, law, or literature it will make absolutely impossible any serious consideration of objectivity—I mean of “thinginess.””

(pages 236-237)

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” In Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004), Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Read (in English) for a class (in German) on Installation, UdK-Berlin.

Each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric

“While walking, the body and the mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act — so much for the Cartesian mind/body divide. Spirituality and sexuality both enter in; the great walkers often move through both urban and rural places in the same way; and even past and present are brought together when you walk as the ancients did or relive some event in history or your own life by retracing its route. And each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience — so unlike the way air travel chops up time and space and even cars and trains do.”

(page xv)

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust.

Recommended to me by my sister; I finally bought a copy at St. George’s Bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. We wandered in, three Canadians on a Friday evening, and ended up entertaining the owner with our absurdities until closing.

In a still barely perceptible scission

“Between word and image, between what is depicted by language and what is uttered by plastic form, the unity begins to dissolve;  a single and identical meaning is not immediately common to them. And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme. Figure and speech still illustrate the same fable of folly in the same moral world, but already they take two different directions, indicating, in a still barely perceptible scission, what will be the great line of cleavage in the Western experience of madness.”

(page 26)

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization.

Borrowed in digital form from the Vancouver Public Library while living in Berlin.

The occasional rock

“The problem with philosophers is that because their jobs are so hard they drink a lot of coffee and thus use in their arguments an inordinate quantity of pots, mugs, and jugs—to which, sometimes, they might add the occasional rock.”

(page 233)

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” In Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004), Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Read (in English) for a class (in German) on Installation, UdK-Berlin.

Mute institution, act without commentary, immediate knowledge

“In the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madness was a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvellous secrets of Knowledge. In our era, the experience of madness remains silent in the composure of a knowledge which, knowing too much about madness, forgets it. But from one of these experiences to the other, the shift has been made by a world without images, without positive character, in a kind of silent transparency which reveals — as mute institution, act without commentary, immediate knowledge — a great motionless structure; this structure is one of neither drama nor knowledge; it is the point where history is immobilized in the tragic category which both establishes and impugns it.”

(page 13)

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization.

Borrowed in digital form from the Vancouver Public Library while living in Berlin.

A sense of meaning like a sense of place

“It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”

(page 13)

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust.

Recommended to me by my sister; I finally bought a copy at St. George’s Bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. We wandered in, three Canadians on a Friday evening, and ended up entertaining the owner with our absurdities until closing.