[Buchli (Ed.), Victor, Christopher, Tilley, The Material Culture Reader, 2002, Berg, 1-85973-559-2, Oxford]
“I am comfortable with my level of public discourse.”
Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon
Declining to be interviewed for a magazine article, quoted in "Armstrong's Code" by Kathy Sawyer in Washington Post Magazine (11 July 1999) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/space/armstrong1.htm
“I am like Montaigne: "unsuited to continuous discourse."”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist
Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Journals A 126 (March 1836)
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s
Context: One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas? Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.
“There cannot be a greater rudeness, than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse”
John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Sec. 145
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: There cannot be a greater rudeness, than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse... To which, if there be added, as is usual, a correcting of any mistake, or a contradiction of what has been said, it is a mark of yet greater pride and self-conceitedness, when we thus intrude our selves for teachers, and take upon us either to set another right in his story, or shew the mistakes of his judgement.
Herbert Schiller (1919–2000) American media critic
Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 138
“Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.”
Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture
Free Culture (2004)
Context: We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.
Jacques Derrida book Writing and Difference
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, tr. w/ intro & notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1978. p. 285
George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer
and many after him
Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City
