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But precisely when childhood is defined as a miracle, we protest that this miracle is nothing other than a premature accession to the adult's powers. [...] the entirely bourgeous notion of the child prodigy (Mozart, Rimbaud, Roberto Benzi); an admirable object insofar as it fulfills the ideal function of all capitalist activity: to gain time, to reduce human duration to a numerative problem of precious moments.
[...] there is no danger in calling Minou Drouet's poetry strange if we recognize it from the first as poetry. Literature, however, only begins out in front of the unnamable, facing the perception of an elsewhere alien to the very langauge which seeks it out. It is this creative doubt, this fecund death which our society condemns in its "good literature" and exorcises in its bad. To insist at the top of our lungs that the Novel be a novel, that Poetry be poetry and the Theater theater, this sterile tautology is of the same order as the denominative laws which govern, in the Civil Code, the ownership of property: here everything coorporates in the great bourgeois task, which is finally to reduce Being to Having, the object to a thing.
[...] A three-quarter pose, more common, suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze dissolves nobly into the future, not confrontational yet dominating and fecundating a modestly indefinite elsewhere. Almost all the three-quarter shots are ascensional, the countenance raised toward a supernatural light which lures it upward, elevating it to regions of a superior humanity, where the candidate attains the Olympus of lofty sentiments, where all political contradiction is resolved: Algerian war and peace, social progress and executive benefits, "free" education and subsidies to the sugar beet farmers, the Right and the Left (an opposition always "transcended!"), all this coexists peacefully in that pensive gaze, nobly fixed on the Occult interests of Order.
[...] Contrary to what one might expect, nothing like a dreamworld is to be found here, but instead a strictly realistic description of a specific social milieu, that of the magazine's female readers. In other words, astrology is definitely not--at least not here--the prolegomenon to a dream, but only a mirror, the mere institution of reality.
The chief rubrics of destiny (Chance, Outside, At Home, Your Heart) scrupulously produce the complete rhythm of a working life; its unit is the week, in which "chance" marks one or two days. Chance here is the portion reserved for interiority, for moods: it is the experiential sign for duration, the only category by which subjective time is expressed and released. For the other days, the stars know nothing but a schedule: Outside is the professional timetable, the six days of the week, the seven hours a day of office or store. At Home is the evening meal, the rest of the evening before bedtim. Your Heart is the date after work or the Sunday adventure. But between these "realms," no communication: nothing which, from one agenda to another, might suggest the notion of a total alienation; the prisons are contiguous, they adjoin but don't contaminate one another. The stars never postulate a reversal of order, they influence on short terms, à la petite semaine, respectful of social status and the boss's calendar.
This myth of the human "condition" relies on a very old mystification, which consists in always placing Nature at the bottom of History. Any classical humanism postulates that if we scratch the surface of human history, the relativity of men's institutions, or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young black murdered by white men, what they think of the great family of men?), we soon reach the bedrock of a universal human nature. [...]
We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without, however, appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive but as a reason. [...]
[...] Myth can reach everything, corrupt everything, and even the very act of refusing oneself to it. So that the more the language object resists at first, the greater its final prostitution; whoever here resists completely yields completely [...] Myth, on the contrary, is a lgnauge which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artifical reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.
reminds me of DFW's thoughts on irony
[...] the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man. It comes to an agreement with the facts, but does not compromise about values, it makes its status undergo a real exnominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named. Bourgeois, petit bourgeois, capitalism, proletariat are the locus of an unceasing hemorrhage: meaning flows out of them until their very name becomes unnecessary.
It is therefore by penetrating the intermediate classes that the bourgeois ideology can most surely lose its name. Petit bourgeois norms are the residue of bourgeois culture, they are bourgeois truths which have become degraded, impoverished, commercialized, slightly archaic, or, shall we say, out of date? The political alliance of the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie has for more than a century determined the history of France; it has rarely been broken, and each time only temporarily (1848, 1871, 1936). This alliance got closer as time passed, it gradually became a symbiosis; transient awakenings might happen, but the common ideology was never questioned again. The same "natural" varnish covers up all "national" representations: the big wedding of the bourgeoisie, which originates in a class ritual (the display and consumption of wealth), can bear no relation to the economic status of the lower middle class: but through the press, the news, and literature, it slowly becomes the very norm as dreamed, though not actually lived, of the petit bourgeois couple. The bourgeoisie is constantly absorbing into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to except in imagination, that is, at the cost of an immobilization and an impoverishment of consciousness. By spreading its representations over a whole catalog of collective images for petit bourgeois use, the bourgeoisie countenances the illusory lack of differentiation of the social classes: it is as from the moment when a typist earning twenty pounds a month recognizes herself in the big wedding of the bourgeoisie that bourgeois exnomination achieves its full effect.
savage
[...] If I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.