A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?
- Robert Musil, The Main without Qualities
This is quoted by Franco Moretti as the epigraph to his wonderful book “Graphs Maps Trees” which Marek and I both read almost two years ago, but I just purchased again to think about. What a great book. He uses modern ideas of statistics, mapping, and data visualization to make literary criticism feel exciting and new. If, as Walter Benjamin has said, the novel was the height of private, individual bourgeois subjectivity, then it is fascinating to look at Moretti’s work as an exploration of the methods and consequences of our current information technologies and how they function to aggregate and analyze this subjective.
“Every epoch dreams the one to follow.”
- Michelet (as quoted by Walter Benjamin)
“… and not only dreams, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”
- Benjamin