"Hidden in a long text, there are perhaps three lines that count"
About this Quote
Buried inside Kluge's deliberately overgrown prose is a provocation: stop mistaking volume for value. "Hidden" implies effort and training on the reader's side; the point is not that most writing is worthless, but that meaning often arrives like contraband, smuggled through digressions, anecdotes, and bureaucratic noise. Kluge, a key figure of New German Cinema and a thinker shaped by postwar Germany's information regimes, knows how power loves long texts: legalese, policy memos, institutional reports, the kind of language that can anesthetize scrutiny. His line is a reader's survival tactic as much as an aesthetic claim.
The "perhaps" matters. It's not a neat rule, it's a skeptical shrug at any system that pretends it can quantify significance. Three lines is a minimalist fantasy, the dream that clarity is always extractable if you're sharp enough. But Kluge also built his career on montage - fragments, footnotes, micro-stories, interviews - a form that treats the excess as part of the truth. The long text isn't just padding; it's camouflage, atmosphere, misdirection, a documentary fog where the real signal can be small, easily missed, and therefore politically urgent.
There's a quiet elitism here, too: the writer who can hide and the reader who can find. Kluge flatters the attentive while indicting the culture that rewards bulk - the novel that must be "important", the essay that performs seriousness by being long. His punchline is editorial and moral: learn to cut, learn to search, learn to distrust the page count.
The "perhaps" matters. It's not a neat rule, it's a skeptical shrug at any system that pretends it can quantify significance. Three lines is a minimalist fantasy, the dream that clarity is always extractable if you're sharp enough. But Kluge also built his career on montage - fragments, footnotes, micro-stories, interviews - a form that treats the excess as part of the truth. The long text isn't just padding; it's camouflage, atmosphere, misdirection, a documentary fog where the real signal can be small, easily missed, and therefore politically urgent.
There's a quiet elitism here, too: the writer who can hide and the reader who can find. Kluge flatters the attentive while indicting the culture that rewards bulk - the novel that must be "important", the essay that performs seriousness by being long. His punchline is editorial and moral: learn to cut, learn to search, learn to distrust the page count.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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