Category Archives: Favourite Thinkers

Bite Size Methods

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“Finding something is easy: it’s knowing that you ought to have looked for it that is hard. You search for known items only once you have done all the real work. In the really important cases, you search for known items only once you already know what they are going to say. In short, if we knew ahead of time what the questions were and what books probably answered them, there would be no reason to do the research.”

Andrew Abbott, 2014, Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials.

Bite Size Theory

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“It is in the very limitations and leanness of shadows that we learn, in the gaps, in the leaps to complete an image, that we perform a generative act of constructing the shape – recognizing a horse, a box, a bed roll, a crutch, a typewriter. The very leanness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition – and that prompts an awareness of the activity, recognizing in this activity our agency in seeing, and our agency in apprehending the world.”

William Kentridge, 2014, Six Drawing Lessons.

Bite Size Criticism

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“International scholarship on Coetzee, with some exceptions, involves walking one step behind the novelist, collecting the allusions he scatters to Foucault or Levinas or Derrida and arranging them reverently in his honour, which is also to the honour of pure literature.

Imran Coovadia, 2012, Transformations: Essays.

Bite Size Criticism

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“T]his is how American folk music works. Forgetting and disappearance are the engines of its romance. They are the motor of the will in the music to create characters, to insist on their mystery and to resist the impulse of society at large to turn the music into social science – or what the late Harlem critic Albert Murray called “social science fiction”.”

Griel Marcus, 2015, Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations.

Bite Size Criticism

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“The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in that could be.”

Pauline Kael, 1965, I Lost It At The Movies.

Bite Size Cavell

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“Empirical statements that claim truth depend upon evidence; statements that claim truthfulness depend upon our acceptance of them. My acceptance is the way I respond to them, and not everyone is capable of the response, or willing for it. I put this by saying that a true statement is something we know or do not know; a truthful statement is one we must acknowledge or fail or refuse to acknowledge.”

Stanley Cavell, 1971, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film.

Bite Size Cavell

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“A work one cares about is not so much something one has read as something one is a reader of; connection with it goes on, as with any relation one cares about.”

Stanley Cavell, 1981, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Romance.

Bite Size Cavell

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“Disillusion is what fits us for reality, whether in Plato’s terms or D.W. Winnicott’s. But then we must be assured that this promise is based on a true knowledge of what our illusions are.”

Stanley Cavell, 1984, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes.

Bite Size Theory

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“The alternative to our contemporary humanitarian culture of human rights is not doing nothing. It is doing something else – and perhaps something better.”

Samuel Moyn, 2014, Human Rights and the Uses of History.

Bite Size Theory

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“The extensiveness of power and its intensity are usually assumed to be conversely related, increase one and the other diminishes or lessens. No such assumption holds, however, when topology enters the frame. Reach, when grasped topologically, is more about presence than distance; it is intensive rather than extensive, a relational arrangement where power composes the spaces of which it is a part by stretching, folding, or distorting relationships to place certain outcomes within or beyond reach.”

John Allen, 2016, Topologies of Power: Beyond Territory and Networks.