[readings for Best Before; this is what we’re up to; arnhem, boston and beijing in new york, August-October 2006]

“The separation between a thing and its environment cannot be absolutely definite and clear-cut; there is a passage by insensible gradations from the one to the other; the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them. Our perception outlines, so to speak, the form of their nucleus; it terminates them at the point where our possible action upon them ceases, where, consequently, they cease to interest our needs. Such is the primary and the most apparent operation of the perceiving mind: it marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended, simply following the suggestions of our requirements and the needs of practical life.” —from Matter and Memory, Bergson

“We ought to think of the historical world according to this model. Why ask if history is made by men or by things, since it is obvious that human initiatives do not annul the weight of things, and the ‘force of things’ always acts through men? It is just this failure of analysis, when it tries to bring everything down to one level, which reveals history’s true milieu. There is no ‘last analysis,’ because there is a flesh of history in which (as in our own body) everything counts and has a bearing — the infrastructure, our idea of it, and above all the perpetual exchanges between the two in which the weight of things becomes a sign as well, thoughts become forces, and the balance of the two becomes events. It is asked, ‘Where is history made? Who makes it? What is this movement which traces out and leaves behind the figures of the wake?’ It is of the same order as the movement of Thought and Speech, and, in short, of the perceptible world’s explosion within us. Everywhere there are meanings, dimensions, and forms in excess of what each ’consciousness‘ could have produced, and yet it is men who speak and think and see. We are in the field of history as we are in the field of language or existence.”These transformations of private into public, of events into meditations, of thought into spoken words and spoken words into thought, this echo coming from everywhere makes it such that in speaking to others we also speak to ourselves, and speak of what exists. This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts–this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.” —from Signs, Merleau-Ponty

“Take, for example, a small drawer, which the carpenter has made for the convenience of some housefold. With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form. A given small space, which was at first occupied by the object, is now occupied by solidified time. It has, in fact, become the incarnation of a certain form of spirit. —from Kinkakuji, Mishima

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