‘Perhaps the truly dangerous classes are not so much the uncivilised ones thought to undermine society from below, but rather the migrants who move at the borders between classes, individuals and groups who develop capabilities within themselves which are useless for the improvement of their material lives and which in fact are liable to make them despise material concerns.’
~ jacques rancière, ‘good times or pleasure at the barricades’
‘There is an underground literature here that no one knows and that is probably vaster than the visible: it was created in poignant leisure hours, often after a miserable day at the shop or the office. Manuscripts pile up in this diligence without effort, long novels and tomes full of accumulated autodidacticism.’
‘Raphael without hands would never have become a great artist but, since he was nonetheless Raphael, perhaps an even more faithful remembrance of ourselves.’
~ both from ernst bloch, traces
(photo from ‘demolished’ by rachel whiteread)
‘It is not an exaggeration to say that the critic has become a retainer to those in our society who want not the difficult reality but merely the illusion of literacy: if he practices in an English department, he carves and trims and patches and binds the prose of future leaders destined to build or destroy the economy; and if he becomes a journalist or reviewer he flatters, cajoles and admonishes the authors of books whose profits keep the publishers happy and his own job relatively secure. We do not need to know more than we already do about the psychology of that literature professor or that literary journalist. The only critic whom we must take seriously is one who may not yet exist; who overextends his art, having decided that his role is creative as well as judicious. His words, the critic’s words, should enter the world of art even as the arts and institutions he comments on have entered his. As the work of art is an event in the history of interpretation, so the work of interpretation should be an event in the history of art.’
~ geoffrey hartman, criticism in the wilderness