To those who’ve “failed”...

“Underneath the large noisy events lie the small events of silence.” - Gilles Deleuze

Rukawat ke liye khed hai

Field of the Visible

"... the whole world becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable." 

- Jean-Louis Comolli 

Touch

"The taste of the apple... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading."
 - Jorge Luis Borges

Ghosts, Futures

"...the debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forward within the modernist, massive, homogenous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language. They surprise."

- Michel de Certeau, from Ghosts in the City

Surfaces

The surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions. The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally

- Siegfried Kracauer 

Mekas

"I want to speak for the small, invisible acts of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the clean lights. I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs. In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily tailor to pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history. I am for art which we do for each other, as friends.

- Jonas Mekas

Benjamin

"In thousands of  eyes, in thousands of objects, the city is reflected."

- Walter Benjamin

Science / Fiction

More de Certeau:

“There can only be a science of science-fiction.”

Michel de Certeau and the presence of absence

Was it fate? I remember the marvelous Shelburne Museum in Vermontwhere, in thirty-five houses of a reconstructed village, all the signs, tools and products of nineteenth-century everyday life teem; everything, from cooking utensils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving instruments, toilet articles, and children’s toys can be found in profusion. The display includes innumerable familiar objects, polished, deformed, or made more beautiful by long use; everywhere there are as well the marks of the active hands and laboring or patient bodies for which these things composed the daily circuits, the fascinating presence of absences whose traces were everywhere. At least this village full of abandoned and salvaged objects drew one’s attention, through them, to the ordered murmurs of a hundred past or possible villages, and by means of these imbricated traces one began to dream of countless combinations of existences.

- Michel de Certeau

Memorable passage from The Practice of Everyday Life.

After Auschwitz...

"After Auschwitz, history is no longer a rational unfolding. The summit of reason, order, administration, is also the summit of terror. Calculation and accounting encounter the mathematical sublime of railway timetables and of genocide at the same time."

- Bill Readings (on Adorno's "After Auschwitz")

''Have patience, and I'll make halvah for you from unripe grapes.''

- Persian proverb

Quote of the day...

"Buildings hold purposes, ruins hold questions and secrets."

From the wonderful blog Welcome to the Interdrome.