ANiCO -- Reply to Jackson Ryland's "The Unconsciousness of the Work" (After-Class 1/28)

I figured I'd make my reply an actual post, if that can count for anything. Here is my reply back on the actual post.

I try to answer Jackson's questions on the originality of ideas, the originality of the Bible, and ideas in the mind vs ideas on paper (if I'm interpreting his question correctly).

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I personally believe that originality stems from the interpretation of another idea--specifically, another text--and the combination of other ideas. Maybe there have been other people before you who made the same combination of ideas. Maybe not.

But the concept of something original supposedly having to be something to have no origin other than itself is ludicrous and an unhealthy ideal. Everything is intertextual, it's just how people work: we are social and learn and create more by communicating and merging our ideas. Even our brains work as a network of memories, where we combine old experiences with new ones and create ideas that way. We take other things and distort it--either through time or by combining it with other ideas--and create something "new".

The Bible is just another example of this. For a long time these stories were told orally, before the technological advancement of writing. Maybe there were many versions of the same stories that we see now in the Bible before they were written. I wouldn’t want to offend anyone or belittle a religion, so I’ll just say we can’t tell if these stories were divinely given to one person, the originator, or were just distortions of stories from other people’s lives. In either case, intertextual distortion had to have happened as they were orally handed down through the years before it was finally written. And even after The Bible was finally written, the time from then till now, plenty must have been distorted through translation and reprints.

Separate from that, the concept of “an idea isn’t an idea until it’s written down” is more difficult for me. I want to say that any idea that passes through a mind exists, no matter how fleeting, in time and space. It WAS there, even if for not very long, and even if no one (even the person who’s thought it belonged to) remembers it.

I think when you write down an idea, it belongs more to everyone else than yourself, because it’s out there for interpretation. I think of crazy things all the time, but whenever I write them down to remind myself later, I always get this sinking feeling about it when I look at it again. When put in writing, it changes. It’s not so much reminding me but making me reevaluate it. Was this a good idea? Does it sound too much like something else? Why did it sound so much better in my head?

If anybody remembers Lacan’s mirror theory in CMC100, this is what this thought process reminds me of. Your own idea becomes an objectified image more at the mercy of the “eyes” than your own original thought.