Sublime

Chesterton’s gustatory metaphor: it suggests that when the mind is governed by properly settled convictions, only then can it be truly nourished. The problem, of course, and sadly, is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled, and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled.

It is necessarily elitist in description: dismissive, paternalistic, insulting, sometimes racist. The mass, said Carey, “is a metaphor for the unknowable and invisible. We cannot see the mass. Crowds can be seen; but the mass is the crowd in its metaphysical aspect—the sum of all possible crowds.… It turns other people into a conglomerate. It denie

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.

Foucault

he takes a much keener interest in the concrete institutional structure of democratic society than either Horkheimer or Adorno.

It is this slackening that thinkers like Jodi Dean, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Andrejevic, Byung-Chul Han and others have warned of as a decline of the symbolic: a malfunctioning of socially sanctioned language, a sagging of meaning and norms.

Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions.

(I find myself thinking of Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.”)

Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will.