Collin G Brooke

irony: the trope that derives its effect of appositiveness to the description of things by playing upon the relation of opposition.

linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.

Liberalism in the sense I am using it refers to the rule of law, a system of formal rules that restrict the powers of the executive, even if that executive is democratically legitimated through an election.

it does involve a kind of close reading, a careful attention to the forms that organize texts, bodies, and institutions.

It is also a broader cultural sensibility composed out of the steady drip-drip of bureaucratic acts, a loose constellation of practices and postures that is diffused throughout society via the legal and executive branches of the modern state. In short, suspicion is less heroic and more humdrum and routinized than we might think.

Charm requires proximity.

“Any point in a process looks like the process was leading up to it if that’s as far as you’ve gotten.”

The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

because scale deals with perspective, it is intertwined with notions of the subject, experience, consciousness, and interpretation.