November 06, 2014

Everett Shinnb. November 6, 1876

Foucault once expressed his wish that he could write like Blanchot, on the precipice of genres, gazing into the void that lies just beyond their boundaries.

By putting itself into jeopardy, fragmentary writing at once generates and thwarts itself. Language pours out of this gap that interrupts any definitive beginning or end, without itself coming to an end. A revealing passage from The Writing of Disaster, cited by Hill, helpfully illustrates this remarkable power of contestation. Blanchot declares that “fragmentary writing might well be the greatest risk. It does not refer to any theory, and does not give rise to any practice definable by interruption. Even when it is interrupted, it carries on. Putting itself in question, it does not take control of the question but suspends it (without maintaining it) as a non-response.” Blanchot’s texts are certainly destructive, but they simultaneously appeal to a principle of freedom at the origin of all literature—that is, a principle that lets us say and contest everything. And yet, in characteristically Blanchotian fashion, this freedom must call itself into question, for the fragmentary disrupts all claims to authority, including its own. It threatens to undermine any form of authorization that could be attributed to the subject, whether of the author, reader, or language.

Hill calls this questioning “sovereign disobedience,” and he helpfully links it to Blanchot’s crucial notion of the neuter (le neutre). The neuter refers to the grammar of the impersonal but more importantly evacuates language of subjectivity. Blanchot says that an altogether other voice than the “I” speaks in literature. Whether in the give and take of speech between multiple interlocutors, or the counterproductive movement of waiting, the impersonal language of the neuter suspends oppositional forces in the text without resolving them. Unlike dialectical thought, as elaborated by Hegel, the neuter neither affirms nor negates being. Literary language resides in a space of the excluded middle (neither something nor nothing). It retracts what it says while crossing out the steps of erasure. And through this movement, the neuter interrupts the mediating power of dialectics, which Blanchot and others in France at the time associated with the violence of totality and appropriation. Whereas the labor of the negative always reduces the other to the order of the same, the neuter welcomes the irreducibility of the other. It gradually undoes the work of literature whose organizing principle synthesizes contradictory positions into an integrated whole. Whereas dialectics gathers everything into unity (such as the state, national language, and a work of art), the neuter restlessly disperses identity and affirms in turn the multiplicity of difference.

Fleishman's Bread LineEverett Shinn

People connect to each other here, is what I’m saying. They get to know each other and they treat each other well. If Twitter is people you don’t know at their wittiest, and Facebook is people you do know at their most mundane, then MetaFilter, I would say, is a family of strangers.

Founded in 1999 by Matt Haughey, a.k.a. mathowie, who worked on an early version of Blogger, one of the first-ever blogging platforms (which was eventually bought by Google), MetaFilter is a venerable institution in a context—the Internet—where the phrase “venerable institution” is only maybe just beginning to acquire a non-ironic usage.

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Nominally, MetaFilter is a venue for people to talk about things other people have done, intelligently and with respect for each other (if not necessarily for the thing being discussed), and a small number of people are paid well to ensure this is what happens. All of this, it seems, adds up to a place with a premium on humility and other-centeredness. Of course, members’ opinions, perspectives, and anecdotes come out inevitably and regularly in the comments, and are in many ways the lifeblood of the site. But the fact remains that structurally, the users’ main input to the site—their comments—are secondary, appendageal, or, looked at another way: supportive.

An Information Guerrilla Readerassembled at Deterritorial Investigations Unit

Brilliant impersonators Kat McGowanaeon

... Throughout human history, innovation – including the technological progress we cherish – has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides. Plenty of animals can innovate, but no other species on earth can imitate with the skill and accuracy of a human being. We’re natural-born rip-off artists. To be human is to copy.

Diversifying Translation Daniel GouldenAsymptote Blog

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The very act of translation heightens the vitality of the languages it connects. It broadens the array of people that the source language can speak to and transforms the function of the target language. The world that Goethe envisions is a world where literatures complement and complicate each other. When larger languages drown out smaller ones, World Literature loses the crucial elements that make it an endeavor worth pursuing.

The era of World Literature is perennially at hand. Just as World Literature has changed since Goethe first conceived it, we need to make the effort to change it from its current form. In order for World Literature to diversify, translators must first make the effort to diversify both in the regions they choose their work, and the languages they choose to translate. In doing so we can add to the vitality of global literature, while demonstrating that translation is not just an art form, but a way to build global equality and understanding.