Storied Attention

“I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out.”
“Rather than supposing
that people apply their
knowledge in practice,
we would be more
inclined to say that they
know by way of their
practice—that is, through
an ongoing engagement,
in perception and action,
with the constituents of
their environment”
(Ingold 159).
“Here, ‘to process’ is
understood in an
intransitive sense.
Like life itself, it does
not begin here or end
there, but is
continually going on.
It is equivalent to the
very movement—the
processing—of the
whole person,
indivisibly body and
mind, through the
lifeworld”
(Ingold 159).
“To be sure, the expert is more
knowledgeable than the novice.
What distinguishes them,
however, is not a greater
accumulation of mental content—
as though with every increment of
learning yet more representations
were packed inside the head—but
a greater sensitivity to cues in the
environment and a greater
capacity to respond to these cues
with judgement and precision. The
difference, if you will, is not one of
how much you know but of how
well you know” (Ingold 161).
“Close reading pays
attention to elements in
the text which, although
marginal, are
nonetheless emphatic,
prominent—elements in
the text which ought to
be quietly subordinate
to the main idea, but
which textually call
attention to
themselves” (Gallop 8).
“Close reading is
thus a technique to
make us learn, to
make us see what
we don’t already
know, rather than
transforming the
new and the
old” (Gallop 11).
“By ‘reading’ here, I
mean of course close
reading, learning to
hear what’s really on
the page, listening
closely to the other, and
being willing to catch
what the other actually
says, and able to hear
what we didn’t expect
him to say” (Gallop 17).
“I suppose this
ought to seem
quite an un-
remarkable
epiphany: that
knowledge does
rather than
simply is it is by
now very routine
to discover”
(Sedgwick 124).
“[The ‘hermeneutics of
suspicion’] may have made
it less rather than more
possible to unpack the local,
contingent relations
between any given piece of
knowledge and its
narrative/epistemological
entailments for the seeker,
knower, or teller”
(Sedgwick 124).
“Paranoia is anticipatory.
Paranoia is reflexive and
mimetic.
Paranoia is a strong
theory.
Paranoia is a theory of
negative affects.
Paranoia places its faith in
exposure” (Sedgwick 130).
“But suppose one takes
seriously the notion […] that
everyday theory qualitatively
affects everyday knowledge and
experience; and suppose that
one doesn’t want to draw much
ontological distinction between
academic theory and everyday
theory; and suppose that one
has a lot of concern for the
quality of other people’s and
one’s own practices of knowing
and experiencing.”
(Sedgwick 144-45).
“The point of issue is not to find categories that ‘place’
the proverbs once and for all. What I want is categories
that suggest their active nature” (Burke 594).
“We have had
the Philosophy
of Being; and we
have had the
Philosophy of
Becoming. In
typical
contemporary
specialization,
we have been
getting the
Philosophy of
the Bin” (Burke
597).
“They would consider works of art, I think,
as strategies for selecting enemies and
allies, for socializing losses, for warding off
evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and
desanctification, consolation and
vengeance, admonition and exhortation,
implicit commands or instructions of one
sort or another. Art forms like ‘tragedy’ or
‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as
equipments for living, that size up
situations in various ways and in keeping
with correspondingly various
attitudes” (Burke 598).