Forster, E.M. Anonymity: An Inquiry

".. all literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts us from their true significance. I do not say literature 'ought' not be signed, because literature is alive, and consequently 'ought' is the wrong word to use. It wants not to be signed.. .. It is always tugging in that direction and saying in effect: 'I, not my author, exist really.'

"Literature does not want to remember. It is alive - not in a vague complimentary sense - but alive tenaciously, and it is always covering up the tracks that connect it with the laboratory."

Anonymity: An Inquiry p. 90 What I believe.

Benjamin, Walter - The Ragpicker - Historical refuse

"Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day's refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry." This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse

SW 4, p. 48

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse-these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

AP, p. 460

Walter Benjamin's Archive p. 251

The Arcades project wishes to pick up the refuse of history. Like a poor and burdened man cleverly picking through the rubbish of the previous day, the materialist historian selects from amongst all that is disregarded and from the residues of history. At the library he is unconcerned with what has been accredited as precious and valuable, but rather is drawn towards historical refuse. Waste materials are to enter into significant connections and fragments are used to gain a new perspective on history.

The Arcades project never made it as far as a composition. It fell through, disintegrating in the collectors hands. The more he collected, the further away shifted any possibility of finding some presentational form for the material.

p. 252, 253.

Benjamin, Walther - Concept of the Archive

Benjamin's concept of the archive, however, differs from that of the institutionalized archives, whose self-understanding is derived from the origin of the word "archive." "Archive" stems from the greek and latin words for "town hall, ruling office," which, in turn, are derived from "beginning, origin, rule" Order, efficiency, completeness, and objectivity are the principles of archival work. In contrast to this, Benjamins archives reveal the passions of the collector. The remains heaped up in them are reserve funds or something like iron reserves, crucial to life, and which for that reason must be conserved. These are points at which topicality flashes up, places that preserve the idiosyncratic registrations of an author, subjective, full of gaps, unofficial.

Benjamin, Walter - a Magic encyclopedia

'Comprehensiveness was neither possible nor sought after'

'Benjamin believed that the basis of collecting does not lie in "exactness," in "silk reeling" or "the complete inventorizing of all data" (GS III, p. 216). Peculiar to the collector is "a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value-that is their usefulness-but studies and loves than as the scene, the stage of their fate" (SW 2:2 p.487).

Benjamin designates the true passion of the collector as "anarchistic, destructive." He affiliates fidelity to the thing with "the wilfully subversive protest against the typical, classifiable." Possession of a thing generates completely irrational accents. For the collector his item, its origin and past all close ranks as " a magic encyclopedia, a world ordering, whose outline is the fate of the object" (GS III pp. 216f)

Walter Benjamin's Archive p.4 and 5.

Goldsmith, Kenneth

"At one point, I envisioned making all the invisible language in the air around us material. At any given moment, there’s language flying all around us that we are not aware of: think of radio waves and cellular phone connections, TV signals, etc.."

"I began to obsess on the amount of language being produced by individuals. What would happen if all the language were somehow materialized?"

"I wanted to write a book that I would never be able to know. The approach I took was that of quantity. I’d collect so many words that each time I’d open my book, I’d be surprised by something that I had forgotten was there. What constitutes a big book? I looked on my bookshelf for clues. I found that any dictionary worth its salt was at least 600 pages so with that in mind, I decided that I would write a 600 page book. I did. And in the end, the project was a failure. I got to know every word so well over the four years that it took to write it that I am bored by the book. I can’t open a page and be surprised. Perhaps quantity was the wrong approach."

Kenneth Goldsmith:

I look to theory only when I realize that somebody has dedicated their entire life to a question I have only fleetingly considered (a work in progress)

Harvey, David. The Right to the city

"The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. It also altered the political landscape as subsidized home-ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defense of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism. Debt-encumbered homeowners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African-Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity."

Harvey, David. The Right to the city

"From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control of their disbursement typically lies in a few hands."

Park, Robert, sociologist, quoted by David Harvey

The city is "man's most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man had remade himself"

Robert Park, On Social control and Collective Behaviour, Chicago 1967, p. 3.

Harvey, David. The Right to the city

"The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights."

Zizek, Slavoj - Do Nothing

‘Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. […] The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active', to 'participate', to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something' [...] The true difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw.’ (Vilolence, Zizek, 2008)

Alys, Francis - collaboration

" The collaboration process is to watch an idea bounce back and forth, and eventually develop its own course in that bouncing ( el rebote)... ...The more the project evolves, the more this bouncing back and forth between myself and the collaborators intensifies, and it can lead to a final shape sometimes quite far from the original intention. It's in that process that the project takes on its own life and develops. The more ambitious the logistics of the project, the more I will turn into a producer or a coordinator of the project and, when it happens, a spectator of my own fantasy."

"And then there are all the other ingredients of the live event. Once the axiom has been posed and the location set, the development and outcome of the piece happen within an open field of possibilities, in the sense that any outcome of the event becomes a valid answer to the premises of the piece. Once the action is launched, there is no longer any strict or unilateral plan to be followed. Only the actual course of the action itself will provide a response to the preliminary axiom."

"The only constant rule that I have witnessed is that if the storyline - the plot proposal - is clear and strong enough, it will resist all these mutations. The situation will unfold in a way not unlike what your intuitive expectations were. It is the test of the scenario. If the scenario does not hold, the action will deviate and become something else."

Francis Alys in conversation with Russell Ferguson. Francis Alys, 2007 Phaidon Press

Barthes, Roland - 2 themes in Photography

Studium

'Thousands of photographs consist of this field and in these photographs I can, of course, take a kind of general interest.. ..What I feel about these photographs derives from an average effect, almost from a certain training."

"..but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn't mean, at least not immediately, "study," but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity."

Punctum

"The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time I will not seek it out, it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

Grundtvig, N.F.S - Folk High Schools

"I saw life, real human life, as it is lived in this world, and saw at once that to be enlightened, to live a useful and enjoyable human life, most people did not need books at all, but only a genuinely kind heart, sound common sense, a kind good ear, a kind good mouth, and then liveliness to talk with really enlightened people, who would be able to arouse their interest and show them how human life appears when the light shines upon it." (1856 quoted in Borish 1991: 18).

http://www.infed.org/schooling/b-folk.htm