Doris Sommer > Quotes

“Civic participation depends on creativity, an (aesthetic) knack for reframing experience, and on a corollary freedom to adjust laws and practices in light of ever-new challenges. Without art, citizenship would shrink to compliance, as if society were a closed text. Reading lessons would stop at the factual “what is,” rather than continue to the speculative “what if.”
― Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

“We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.”
― Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

“Leadership, Boal concluded, is the art of facilitating imaginative interventions by the greatest possible number...”
― Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

“Since most things have more than one name there’s no mistaking the signifier for the signified, no forgetting that precarious meanings and relationships can fail you. On the other hand, the overload of symbolic systems underlines a reality that might seem illusory in one code. The world is real, and dear, because things and people exist beyond any one word that tries to capture them. And on yet another—third—hand (excess is the issue here) the risks—sometimes the anticipation—of failure make communication thrilling. Ordinary contact is close to the aesthetic experience. Running the risk of misrepresentation and misrecognition shows a kind of breathtaking vulnerability, a social death wish at the limit of bi-language games. Will addressing a stranger in Spanish be an invitation to intimacy or an offense to someone who prefers to pass? Will it reveal mistaken assumptions about someone who speaks Arabic or Hindi, but not Spanish? The question may not sound important to people who don’t make these decisions daily and don’t worry about the risk. Perhaps they counsel us to get over the complication and simply speak English (‘‘This is how we do things here,’’ is Brian Barry’s bottom line), as if worrying about which language to use were not an exercise in the interpersonal delicacy and caution that amount to civic behavior. Am I making any sense in English, to people who may be assessing what I say without offering to asesorar?”
― Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education

“The aesthetic education offers a "subjective" transformation of each person's private war of conflicting drives into a knack for making beautiful public peace offerings.”
― Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities