Primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilisation, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth,  and primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing. If civilisation has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. 101

The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

[...]

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading believe every word of it. Finally, when we are done with it, we may find – if it's a good novel – that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But its' very hard to say just what we learned, how we are changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Introduction' in The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. xvi

It is never too late to give up on our prejudices

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up on our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 7

En enda förblivande konst

Min gamla tanke är att konsten inte är en benämning på en kategori eller ett område, som omfattar en oöverskådlig mängd begrepp och sig förgrenande företeelser, utan tvärtom någonting starkt begränsat och koncentrerat, att den betecknar en grundprincip, som ingår i vad man sammanfattar i begreppet konstnärlig framställning, att den är en benämning på en kraft som där kommer till användning eller på en däri utvecklad sanning. Och konsten har aldrig tyckts mig vara ett formtema, en sida av formen utan fastmer en hemlighetsfull och fördold del av innehållet. Detta är för mig klart som dagen, jag känner det med varje fiber, men hur skall jag uttrycka och klart formulera denna tanke?

Verken kommer till tals på många sätt: genom sina teman, sina teser, sina ämnen och hjältar. Men framför allt talar de genom närvaron av den konst som de innehåller. Konstens närvaro på sidorna i "Brott och Straff" skakar oss mer än Raskolnikovs brott.

Den primitiva konsten, den egyptiska, den grekiska, vår tids konst, allt detta är förvisso under loppet av många årtusenden ett och detsamma, en enda förblivande konst. Den är ett slags tanke, ett slags påstående om livet, som i sin allomfattande vidd inte kan sönderdelas i enstaka ord, och när ett uns av denna kraft ingår som en beståndsdel i en mer komplicerad blandning, kommer tillsatsen av konst att väga upp betydelsen av allt det övriga och visa sig vara den innersta kärnan, själen och grunden i framställningen.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 310

SimAmerica

What can be seen in these quick glimpses of emergent SimAmerica is a place where conventional politics is being increasingly emptied of substance and any presumption of factuality or objectivity; where a powerfully conservative hyperreality absorbs the real-and-imagined in its own skein of simulations; where representative democracy is being rechanneled into a politics of strategic representation, dissembling reality into competitive image-bites and electronic populism; where trickle-down economics is practiced without blush or question despite all the empirical evidence of its failures; and where "political correctness" and other brilliantly devised hypersimulations are spun into ever-absorptive and appealing metafrauds.

Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis (Blackwell Publishing, 2000) p. 347

A subject uses names to make hypotheses about himself

A subject is that which uses names to make hypotheses about truth. But as he is himself a finite configuration of the generic procedure from which a truth results, one can equally sustain that a subject uses names to make hypotheses about himself, "himself" meaning the infinite of which he is the finite.

Alain Badiou, 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Topoi 7 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) p. 98

Making a hole in knowledge

An irrevocable step forward has been made through the critique of earlier concepts of the subject, which is thoroughly based on the notion that truth is not a qualification of knowledge nor an intuition of the intelligible. One must come to conceive of truth as making a hole in knowledge.

Alain Badiou, 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Topoi 7 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) p.94

The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth

There's a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it, which produces the madness of so many in our era. In reality, everything involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 97

The measure of the truth

The problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

There is no longer a reason

Metaphysical problems are revealed always to have been genuine problems, since they do admit of a solution. But their resolution depends on one precise and highly constraining condition – that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response 'for no reason' is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like 'Where do we come from?', 'Why do we exist?', we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies 'From nothing. For nothing' really are answers, thereby realizing that these really were questions – and excellent ones at that. There is no longer a mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 110

A principle of unreason

The absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being. We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 60

To do without something one wants

It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing – I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p. 242

The true and the beautiful

The true and the beautiful are akin. truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. [...] The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 225

Truth is a river

Yet ridiculous as may seem the dualities in conflict at any given time, it does not follow that dualism is in itself a worthless process. Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 73

Written truth

But if an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth. The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. The book of my desires? Those also are true only when their impulse acts independently of my conscious will. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 181

Perfection vs disintegration

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 57

We can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumour invariably lacks.

Walter Benjamin, 'Max Brod's Book on Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 142

TAMARUS: But ideas are like money. There must be an accepted coin which circulates. Concepts which are used for communication are justified by success.
ANNANDINE: That's near to saying that a story is true if enough people believe it.
TAMARUS: Of course I don't mean that. If I use an analogy or invent a concept part of what must be tested when the success is tested is whether by this means I can draw attention to real things in the world. Any concept can be misused. Any sentence can state a falsehood. But words themselves don't tell lies. A concept may have limitations but these won't mislead if I expose them in my use of it.
ANNANDINE: Yes, that's the grand style of lying. Put down your best half truth and call it a lie, but let it stand all the same. It will survive when your qualifications have been forgotten, even by yourself.
TAMARUS: But life has to be lived, and to be lived it has to be understood. This process is called civilization. What you say goes against our very nature. We are rational animals in the sense of theory-making animals.
ANNANDINE: When you've been most warmly involved in life, when you've most felt yourself to be a man, has a theory ever helped you? Is it not then that you meet with things themselves naked? Has a theory helped you when you were in doubt about what to do? Are not these very simple moments when theories are shilly-shallying? And don't you realize this very clearly at such moments?
TAMARUS: My answer is twofold. Firstly that I may not reflect upon theories, but I may be expressing one all the same. Secondly that there are theories abroad in the world, political ones for instance, and so we have to deal with them in our thoughts, and that at moments of decision too.
ANNANDINE: If by expressing a theory you mean that someone else could make a theory of what you do, of course that is true and uninteresting. What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.
TAMARUS: That may be. But what about my other point?
ANNANDINE: It is true that theories may often be part of a situation that one has to contend with. But then all sorts of obvious lies and fantasies may be a part of such a situation; and you would say that one must be good at detecting and shunning lies, and not that one must be good at lying.
TAMARUS: So you would cut all speech, except the very simplest out of human life altogether. To do this would be to take away our very means of understanding ourselves and making life endurable.
ANNANDINE: Why should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story – but that doesn't stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence.

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) pp. 80-81

'[...] As soon as I start to describe, I'm done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you...'
'Touch it up?' I suggested.
'It's deeper than that,' said Hugo. 'The language just won't let you present it as it really was.'
'Suppose then,' I said, 'that one were offering the description at the time.'
'But don't you see,' said Hugo, 'that just gives the thing away. One couldn't give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one's heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to try to make an impression – it would be for effect, it would be a lie.'
I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn't see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, 'But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like "Pass the marmalade" or "There's a cat on the roof", turns out to be a sort of lie.'
Hugo pondered this. 'I think it is so,' he said with seriousness.
'In that case one oughtn't to talk,' I said.
'I think perhaps one oughtn't to,' said Hugo, and he was deadly serious. Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end.
'That's colossal!' said Hugo. 'Of course one does talk. But,' and he was grave again, 'one does make far too many concessions to the need to communicate.'
'What do you mean?'
'All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us – and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.'

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) pp. 59-60

The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a café will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 31