[The] chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the
world rather than divert it, and if I could compass that designe without
hurting my own person or Fortune I would be the most Indefatigable writer
you have ever seen ... Since you will now be so much better employd when
you think of the World give it one lash the more at my Request. I have
ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is
towards individualls for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love
Councellor such a one, Judge such a one for so with Physicians (I will not
Speak of my own Trade) Soldiers, English, Scotch, French; and the rest but
principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily
love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth. this is the system upon which I
have governed my self many years (but do not tell) and so I shall go on
till I have done with them I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving
the falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show it
should be only rationalis capax. Upon this great foundation of
Misanthropy (though not Timons manner) The whole building of my Travells
is erected ...
Mr. Lewis sent me an Account of Dr Arbuthnett's Illness which is a very
sensible Affliction to me, who by living so long out of the World have
lost that hardness of Heart contracted by years and generall Conversation.
I am daily loosing Friends, and neither seeking nor getting others. O, if
the World had but a dozen Arbuthnetts in it I would burn my Travells.
...
Jonathan Swift Letter to Alexander
Pope, 29 September 1725
Greenberg/Piper edition, Norton, 1973
I do these things
Oh how I persist I am at least persistent
And I ask
Does anybody want them?
The answer comes back
Nobody at all
So I go on.
Howard Barker The Forty
I never felt, for example, that I was remaking society, but
I felt that my work demonstrated a kind of intellectual atmosphere of the
most formulative, creative part of my life, my early twenties. I was in a
society of painters and writers, that were absolutely free, but for
another reason, [had] nothing to do with politics. They were free, I was
free, because nobody cared. And maybe that not caring is the best type of
freedom possible, either for society or composer. Nobody cared. My father
cared, because he didn't want me to be a composer, but no one else cared.
I gave performances, people really didn't care. They didn't have the
energy even to hiss or boo, that's how disinterested they were. And I
always felt that that was the best type of environment to be an artist
— indifference — I don't mind indifference.
Morton Feldman
In conversation, 1972
Tonight, Wednesday, 3 March, at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken
performs the 95-minute Morton Feldman piano solo Triadic
Memories at the Players Theatre, 115 Macdougal Street. Tickets are
$20.00 and available online here.
Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes
souls into things. On its own account, even in advance of total planning,
the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the
behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities
have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this
character has spread like a cataract across the life of society in all its
aspects. The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress
standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent and
rational one. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or
unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the
schemata assigned to it. Everything which is different, from the idea to
criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch
from the classroom to the trade union. Yet even the threatening collective
is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the
powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence. Its
brutality, which keeps the individual up to the mark, no more represents
the true quality of people than value represents that of commodities. The
demonically distorted form which things and human beings have taken on in
the clear light of unprejudiced knowledge points back to domination, to
the principle which already impaired the qualities of mana to
spirits and deities and trapped the human gaze in the fakery of sorcerers
and medicine men. The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was
sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly
comprehensible life. The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly
appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its
counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today:
human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by
a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are
powerless.
Below, a video of Adorno from a German documentary. Narrated in German,
Adorno's remarks themselves, which begin about 55 seconds into the clip,
are subtitled in English: