Dada Voles

“Plate of spaghetti, um um!” — Nico, in “La Dolce Vita.”

Walter Benjamin’s third Principle of the Weighty Tome: “Conceptual distinctions laboriously arrived at in the text are to be obliterated again in the relevant notes.”

“It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.” — Michael J. Lewis, art professor at Williams College (thanks to Photon Courier).

“Regardless of an individual’s preferred learning modalities, the discipline he is trying to learn will have demands of its own. If I’m basically an auditory learner and I’m studying fine art, I’d better develop my visual sense. If I’m studying pottery, I’d better improve my ability to think with my hands. A person who grows accustomed to having information presented to him in his preferred learning style will be unable to deal with real-world problems, which show up in many different forms and don’t really care in what form you would prefer to encounter them.” — David Foster (Photon Courier) (thanks to University Diaries).

“When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. When everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed. Hence the more equal men are, the more insatiable will be their longing for equality.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

“So we arrive at the startling conclusion that true competition is identical with true cooperation. Each player tries his [sic] hardest to defeat the other, but in this use of competition it isn’t the other person we are defeating; it is simply a matter of overcoming the obstacles he presents. In true competition no person is defeated. Both players benefit by their efforts to overcome the obstacles presented by the other… both grow stronger and each participates in the development of the other.” — W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis.

“The best argument for leaving others alone in their bizarre beliefs, for being curious but not contemptuous, is the recognition of your own capacity to believe things equally as odd.” — Seth Edenbaum of An Unenviable Situation.

“Middle-Class/Working Class
Becoming/Being
Achieving/Belonging
Individual/Group

Thought/Action
Abstract/Concrete
Decorum/Practicality

Past—Future/Present
Entitlement/Undeserving” — Oso Raro, Slaves of Academe

“If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a school-master is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to that relation.” — Marx, Capital vol. 1, 644.

“We shall, of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise philosophers by explaining to them that the ‘liberation’ of man is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the trash to ’self-consciousness’ and by liberating man from the domination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse….” Marx, The German Ideology.

“But in order fully to understand the immediate submission that the state order elicits, it is necessary to break with the intellectualism of the neo-Kantian tradition to acknowledge that cognitive structures are not forms of consciousness but dispositions of the body. That the obedience we grant to the injunctions of the state cannot be understood either as mechanical submission to an external force or as conscious consent to an order (in the double sense of the term). The social world is riddled with calls to order that function as such only for those who are predisposed to heed them as they awaken deeply buried corporeal dispositions, outside the channels of consciousness and calculation. It is this doxic submission of the dominated to the structures of a social order of which their mental structures are the product that Marxism cannot understand insofar as it remains trapped in the intellectualist tradition of the philosophy of consciousness. In the notion of false consciousness that it invokes to account for the effects of symbolic domination, the superfluous term is ‘consciousness’. And to speak of ‘ideologies’ is to locate in the realm of ‘representations’ — liable to be transformed through this intellectual conversion called ‘awakening of consciousness’ — what in fact belongs to the order of belief, that is, to the level of the most profound corporeal dispositions. Submission to the established order is the product of the agreement between, on the one hand, the cognitive structures inscribed in bodies by both collective history (phylogenesis) and individual history (ontogenesis) and, on the other, the objective structures of the world to which these cognitive structures are applied.” — Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” 54-5.