"There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it. […]
The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. […]
Now the few who make it as it is made, and it is to be remarked that the most decided of them usually are prepared just as the world around them is preparing, do it in this way and so I if you do not mind I will tell you how it happens. Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening. […]
To come back to the part that the only thing that is different is what is seen when it seems to be being seen, in other words, composition and time-sense."
Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, 1925
Sir Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in wallpapered room, 1938
Jutta Koether, f., Sternberg Press, 2015
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1959
Über Jacques Lacans (1908–1981) "objet petit a"
Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, 1925
