BERNEVAL

Samuel R. Delany
“… 3,2,1, Contact”
Kessler Lecture published in Queer Ideas

Stand alone paragraph in the peroration

Tolerance — not assimilation — is the democratic litmus test for social equality.

This notion is earlier set out in critical theory mode reflection on interclass
contact which for good measure is repeated twice in the piece.

To repeat: given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive and pleasant when the greatest number of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will. The class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world militates for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed. While the establishment and utilization of those institutions always involves specific social practices, the effects of my primary and secondary theses are regularly perceived at the level of discourse. Thus, it is only by a constant renovation of the concept of discourse that society can maintain the most conscientious and informed field for the establishment of such institutions and practices – a critique necessary if new institutions of any efficacy are to develop. At this level, in its largely stabilizing/destabilizing role, superstructure (and superstructure at its most oppositional) can impinge on
infrastructure.

This set of insights is elaborated in the context of a piece about Times Square development (hence the remark about discourse and infrastructure).

And so for day 2510
27.10.2013

Samuel R. Delany

The Atheist in the Attic

[a certain little discourse on observational-induced defamiliarization]

As I looked around, I thought: Someone has put some thinking into how this had best be done, so that I, the presumed beneficiary of that thinking, need not think at all. But here I am, thinking anyway about the individual thoughts such thinking comprised, approving this bit, questioning that one, disapproving of another — well, thinking about what’s not supposed to require thinking, that is philosophy, no?

reading about reading …

And so for day 2504
21.10.2013

Zenna Henderson
“Jordan”
Ingathering: The Complete People Stories

“Perhaps, perhaps. Who is to say which is better — to hunger and be fed, or to be fed so continuously that you never know hunger? Sometimes a little fasting is good for the soul. Think of a cold drink of water after an afternoon in the hayfield.”

On Transience
By Sigmund Freud
Translation by James Strachey

A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.

Marielle Macé
Façons de lire, manières d’être

L’Expérience du proverbe recèle ces deux surprises : d’abord la surprise de constater la forces des lieux communs, la puissance de traction d’un langage extérieur; puis, dans un second temps — dans cet après-coup si caractéristique de Paulhan — celle de comprendre qu’il nous faut les assister dans leur force et pour leur efficacité et veiller sur elle.

common places. emotional lives. efforts.

And so for day 2503
20.10.2013