originality

The problem with fucking originality is that it leads to reproduction.
---b.

"Perfectly unborrowed", as Coleridge said of Wordsworth's poetry. Originality is inseparable from a powerful sense of the individual, and the boundaries of this individuality are strongly protected.

In traditional societies, conformity to certain respected patterns and conventions was the norm. The pot, the carving, the exquisite weaving needed no signature. By contrast, the modern artefact bears the stamp of personality. The work is the signature.

---Ian McEwan.

via Bob, ('The Overgrown Path')...

'In recent years, political writers have made note of a phenomenon they call "epistemic closure". The term refers to the ease with which people become caught in an information loop that offers a fully satisfying explanation of the way things are and presents no challenges to that perspective. The great practical advantage of free speech and a robust media, it has been said, lies in the way they enable a continual testing of propositions and ideas. But the Internet and social networking, which some tout as mainly a force for good, also allows people to confine themselves to a Möbius strip of the like-minded. Evangelicals and gay activists, Tea Partiers and jihadists, anarchists and Marines - any group can exist within an information membrane of its own devising, unchallenged by outside sources. The consequences for civility and public discourse are becoming all too clear.'

~~~

This notion, that one's 'got it', often stunts any possibility of growth or originality. It's easy to slide from being sure of yourself to being sure that others are wrong (both feed off one another); it's easy to accept that the answer has already been worked out for you well in advance and all you have to do is nod your head, repeat the words, and step into your pre-assigned role.

It could be argued that the various forms of fundamentalism we witness are modern-day reactions to the preponderance of doubt and uncertainty, to the fragmentation of narratives and our inability to turn to Nature, Reason, or God for some coherent picture and our place in it. What is historical here, and what deep, psychological impulse? Conformity, order, the end of the story, there in the beginning all along; the allure of belonging, the 'charm of tyranny' (Buruma).

To talk of individualism today is, the detractors would say, to align oneself with the forces of capitalism. There's a lot of truth to that. But the alternative is surely not to go back to the hierarchies and distinctions of tribe, religion, 'community', the closed, certain world of blood and soil.

The most difficult thing to conceive of: I-We.