Originality is a myth. Human beings never have and never will "create" anything; to do so would necessitate a mind that operates independent of sensory and symbolic input, and no such mind could ever exist and communicate with us in any way that would be meaningful. There is no creation, only infinite translation, re...-interpretation, and re-combination. All art, all thought, all action, is iterative, and derivative.
"But what about the space shuttle or the SR-71?" says the gentle reader. "There are no natural precedents for those creations."
Such as space shuttles and SR-71s are not found in nature, no. But just as the first human who picked up a rock and cracked at it with second rock until the first rock became a knife wasn't really creating out of nothing so much as he was adapting that which was extant for his or her own purposes, so too is even the most advanced human achievement an adaptation of that which already exists. There are a million or more permutations between that original stone knife and the SR-71, but there are such permutations. The SR-71 does not exist without the A-12, which does not exist without the U-2, which does not exist without the F-104...and so on back to the ME-262, and so on back more to the Wright Brothers Flyer, and so on back to the first human to look at a bird and envy its flight. The titanium in the skin of an SR-71 could only be produced after humans had mastered the metallurgy of iron, which was only possible once humans had mastered the metallurgy of bronze, and so on back to the knife again. Even the most radical breakthrough is no more and no less than an adaptation of that which already exists.
The notion that ideas can come from nowhere, that people can access some sort of headspace for inspiration that is anything more than the sum of their experiences to create something truly "original" or "out of this world" is fallacious, as is any valuation of that which is "original" over that which is "derivative." All human thought is derivative; the best of us can derive more broadly and deeply than others such that the origins of their derivations are not so obvious to him whose derivations are but narrow and shallow, until the origins of the best derivations are mystified in "genius" or made "divine," but even the best of us is merely creating a new permutation of existing elements.
Does a painter paint outside of the colors he can see? Does his mind tell him to go beyond the visual spectrum--that only by painting in colors that the human eye cannot perceive can his work be realized? So he paints a square blue sun--is the square unknown to him? Is blue? Is the sun? It is possible he paints a picture of the sun that the rest of us cannot even recognize as such, but in doing so he still rather reassembles elements of other paintings and of his own perceptions of the sun rather than do something truly original. Show me the man blind from birth who paints masterpieces, and I'll show you a sui generis thinker. Show me the cave artist who leap-frogged over twenty thousand years of technique to paint in exacting proportion and who then went beyond that to a new abstraction made only possible by the implementation of complex concepts that only developed in response to the perfection of established artistic techniques, and I'll show you an original thinker. Show me the poet who works in a language with which she has no other facility to create beautiful poetry, rather than drawing on the millennia of of literature and political history and conceptual development expressed in every syllable of our speech. Show me the poet who has never read any other poetry; show me the engineer who builds robots without understanding the workings of such simpler machines as other men have made and made explicit long before he was ever born. Then I'll show you an original thinker.
But until such time as that, I am going to aver that we are all plagiarists. Smartness is skill and subtlety in plagiarism; smartness is having so many sources recombining within one's head that one cannot attribute one's efforts to anything other than "originality."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Humans did create something original-- they created language. Even if you took a few blank human beings, isolated from all animal sounds, they would eventually use sounds to communicate with each other. At which point those are no different the same grunting proto-humans that may have seen animals do it first. Over time some tribe made a language, and once upon a time, emerged a poet who evolved new structures and words and used language in new ways. However, had he achieved originality he would have been very lonely communicating his discoveries to his denser "peers". How is that not an idea in a vacuum? Ah, and this loneliness never happens, especially to artists. The first one to use a club probably had it better.
I suppose humans have a very specific capacity for sound, yet your argument here would deny them claim to any further related innovations. Chemists have made new compounds, yet since they are composed of matter, they're null and derivative. If you're going to say that anything by existence and pre-existence is derivative and non-original then that's just picking an arbitrary definition of a label in an effort to debate the definition of a different label (originality).
Destroying the Earth's ozone layer with freon is something new, without precedent, yet it's not original. Nor was the atom bomb. Both of these things took multiple people working together, so it must not be original. We are made of matter and thus are plagiarists.
This seems mostly an argument about granularity. The Earth looks remarkably different than it did 3,000 years ago, yet none of it is original? Small, incremental changes have been effected. Yet none were "new", despite evidencing substantial change.
So it's really that you're disappointed that people do not isolate themselves in cages, so that one might suddenly leapfrog 20,000 years of painting technique.
If he only leaps 5,000 years, or 10, he's insufficiently original.
So if normal people do ingest the mounds of information around, and come up with something new worth 10 years of technique times 7 billion people, that still has no value?
It seems like you'd just discount that as yet another shade of grey, black and white were lost to entropy so long ago.
Scientists do actually see new things no one else has seen before sometimes. "Everyone" in your article might be writers and artists, I'm not sure the complaint applies to everyone.
I am not complaining, nor am I disappointed, nor am arguing that people *should* put themselves in cages. These things would only be true if I valued originality, which, in its common sense, I do not. The only thing I am attempting to nullify in the previous argument is the idea that, when people have an idea, it comes from "nowhere" or is "divinely inspired" or is somehow otherwise "original."
Again, you refer to science as a refutation of my argument. Again, I would point out that science is an especially iterative process. The touchstone for physical science is that quality of being repeated and observed and for the knowledge to be disseminated among other scientists (and, eventually, high school students who are primarily interested in seeing what they can incinerate in the Bunsen burner). While movies love to posit the mad scientist working in isolation and discovering things that no-one else can discover, real scientists read journals and familiarize themselves with the findings of others and repeat experiments that others have done and then build on those ideas by engaging in many, many hours of research and experimentation in order to advance scientific knowledge incrementally forward. And yes, when the scientist is done, she might have created a thing for which there is no exact natural precedent. But in responding to her physical circumstances, and in doing so equipped with extant concepts and technologies, has she done something "original?" Only if you want to discount all the knowledge accumulated over hundreds of years that goes into her being able to advance science that one small step. Somebody without that training in the ideas of others cannot do effective science. The atom bomb the same; for all that it was a "radical" breakthrough, the scientists at Los Alamos were largely working with theories put forward by physicists in the early 1900s, which in turn were informed by breakthroughs in atomic theory of the 1800s. I admit to not being intimately familiar with the history of science in this regard, but I draw attention to the great amount of theoretical and practical work (quantum physics, isotopes, particles, the special theory of relativity, etc.) that necessarily preceded the breakthrough of the atom bomb.
I am not trying to nullify any accomplishments, as you say here. I am instead trying to posit that knowledge is an inherently social construction that is informed by the senses such that no thought that a person has is not a combination of other thoughts with other sense data, rather than being a *creatio ex nihilo*. The degree of individualness in a person's thinking might well be a reflection of the quality and quantity of his sources, instead of being an intrinsic quality, as those who become the best at what they do inevitably have had the most exposure to the most ideas of others.
You are offended, and I apologize for any offense. It is never my intention to offend--well, hardly ever, and not now. I do not seek to devalue the accomplishments you mention; I only seek to offer an alternative means of thinking about them, and suggest that if we are to value them, that we do not do so thinking that their creators derived their ideas some mystical or genius space that the rest of us could never access, and so are qualitatively different from the rest of us, rather than quantitatively. If anything, once the mysticism of originality is removed, we might come to value achievements more, not seeing them as having their origin in some patronizing divine will but rather in human beings themselves, and in the collective knowledge of human beings. Though I give less credit to the individual, I give more credit to the whole in its necessary participation in the individual's achievement.
Post a Comment