Being 'post-idea' has value as an approach to artistic expression. Scholarship has been slower to embrace the technique because ideas are its stock in trade. This is unfortunate because concepts, especially when deployed in the practice of explanation, get in the way of understanding. And even understanding, as a goal of expression and representation, is limiting. I wonder to what extent, and how, engagement with phenomena and their representations enters human sensing and perception, before or absent any acts of interpretation or ideation, as modes of explanation, occur.
Of course, I am using a few ideas to make my point in the paragraph above, and throughout this post, so I do not want to adopt a post-idea approach to my engagement with plants, but I do want to foster and develop a more-than-idea technique. What would that be?
I think a good place to start would be to use modes of expression that do not use words. Words are to ideation as . . . chlorophyll is to photosynthesis? As I write this I realize that I am hopelessly trapped in the process of forming concepts, of producing ideas. Even William Faulkner and James Joyce, and other abstract and stream-of-consciousness writers, used words to produce concepts, at least as a part of their practice and product.
Abandoning writing for music, one could compose a kind of tone poem that draws its inspiration or input from a plant (not plants, which I think is key, because generalization is a kind of ideation, but then such an assertion raises doubts about the existence of a unitary organism, or the validity of such an idea . . . ). I suppose the phenomenon of plants exists as well as that of plant, although I think anyone would be hard pressed to give a satisfying, let alone comprehensive or exhaustive, description, or make more than an elementary distinction between the single and the plural forms of the phenomenon.
And there you have it, in all of its obnoxious and monopolizing power, an example of the tyranny of the idea via the word. I think at times I have managed to escape this trap in short passages of my Fasiolo novel, but I do not think that one can use words for any length and avoid ideas - and more importantly, indeation - completely.
What would this blog, or what would a post, look like without ideation, without words? Let me see if I can produce something that is more-than-idea, or maybe even post-idea, about plants, and post it here to this blog.
Of course, I am using a few ideas to make my point in the paragraph above, and throughout this post, so I do not want to adopt a post-idea approach to my engagement with plants, but I do want to foster and develop a more-than-idea technique. What would that be?
I think a good place to start would be to use modes of expression that do not use words. Words are to ideation as . . . chlorophyll is to photosynthesis? As I write this I realize that I am hopelessly trapped in the process of forming concepts, of producing ideas. Even William Faulkner and James Joyce, and other abstract and stream-of-consciousness writers, used words to produce concepts, at least as a part of their practice and product.
Abandoning writing for music, one could compose a kind of tone poem that draws its inspiration or input from a plant (not plants, which I think is key, because generalization is a kind of ideation, but then such an assertion raises doubts about the existence of a unitary organism, or the validity of such an idea . . . ). I suppose the phenomenon of plants exists as well as that of plant, although I think anyone would be hard pressed to give a satisfying, let alone comprehensive or exhaustive, description, or make more than an elementary distinction between the single and the plural forms of the phenomenon.
And there you have it, in all of its obnoxious and monopolizing power, an example of the tyranny of the idea via the word. I think at times I have managed to escape this trap in short passages of my Fasiolo novel, but I do not think that one can use words for any length and avoid ideas - and more importantly, indeation - completely.
What would this blog, or what would a post, look like without ideation, without words? Let me see if I can produce something that is more-than-idea, or maybe even post-idea, about plants, and post it here to this blog.
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