No Sign of a Concept
I can’t start making a concept and I can’t set myself to the task of starting to make a concept.
I can take it into my head to make a concept, but this gets me no closer to making a concept.
I can think about making concepts, but this also gets me no closer to making a concept.
I can’t figure out how to make a concept – in what sense can I still hope to make a concept?
Can I hope to do anything worthwhile when I don’t know what I am doing?
To push forward confusedly—blindly, even-- is rarely a way to succeed.
But this may be an indication it is the way to proceed in concept creation.
To not know, to not be able to “figure it out”, especially to not be able to conjure it up as a completed figure or image of any sort --I think these may be necessary conditions of concept creation.
A concept can’t “make sense” when it’s being created. How could it?
I can take it into my head to make a concept, but this gets me no closer to making a concept.
I can think about making concepts, but this also gets me no closer to making a concept.
I can’t figure out how to make a concept – in what sense can I still hope to make a concept?
Can I hope to do anything worthwhile when I don’t know what I am doing?
To push forward confusedly—blindly, even-- is rarely a way to succeed.
But this may be an indication it is the way to proceed in concept creation.
To not know, to not be able to “figure it out”, especially to not be able to conjure it up as a completed figure or image of any sort --I think these may be necessary conditions of concept creation.
A concept can’t “make sense” when it’s being created. How could it?
posted by Yusef Asabiyah at 5:55 PM
2 Comments:
"A concept can’t “make sense” when it’s being created. How could it?"
Even if it does not make sense
while it is coming into being,
it certainly is not meaningless.
In other words, we have to seperate
sense and meaning. Also, we dont want to fall into a traditional
metaphysical way of understanding
meaning and sense: that it is only
that which is already given that
can make sense of the present. Plato would say, it is only because
the transcdental ideas has already
been given, that our perception makes any sense at all: that we
can recognise things for what they
are, since they look like the idea
that they are a representation of.
In that way, we have a traditional
concept of representation: in thought we grasp the idea, in speech we represent thought, and
writing, the lowest of them all,
we make a copy of a copy: ONLY
a way to represent speech.
However, we know that representation in its nature as a repetition, a copy of a copy, can rebel
against the structure that made the
repetition possible in the first place. This rebelling movement, may not make much sense
when it is happening, but certainly
is not meaningless. We also find
that the metaphysics, whether we
concieve of it as a structure, an
idea or otherwise, always
harbour the possibility of its own
displacement. Thus, we need no
method to read, write, analyse,
interprete or otherwise, our textual material/culture/phenomenon or concept, in order to make sense
of it. All we have to do, is
making a gesture that points at the places, where it
displaces the structure that gave birth to it in the first place and
thus comes into being (again).
That is the gesture of deconstruction.
EF
"In other words, we have to seperate sense and meaning."
I think that's a very good idea.
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