Living Tissue/Dead Ideas

Think of dead ideas as deposited in language and writing, as the compost heap in which present language and writing grows. Suppose dead ideas as comprising an historical unconscious lived out as perception, as smell and taste, as speech. Imagine consciousness resounding with an inexhaustible repository of ideas, as a cave to be mined. And consider poetry as that mining, so the incorporation of dead ideas (call them prior texts) into a work is not simply collage or a familiar, almost comforting, defamiliarization technique, but the spiritual domain of poetry, its subject (subjectness) percolating through. Ideas not dead then, though their origin is past. Or ideas dead only in the way a culture may die, be lost, its people vanish without records or monuments or memories. Ideas, then, not so much dead as submerged, melted, transubstantiated, absorbed; everywhere informing but no where fully explicable. Yet such ideas are neither solace, as a past to which we can turn, nor tools to represent the present. In this sense, dead ideas are not the stars but the heaven in which the stars gleam, not tools but tolls

Art · Sociology · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Media, Communication, and Education · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

• Beyond cyborgs

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• In the Tracks of Historical Materialism

  Perry Anderson•Labour / Le Travail•1985

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• The Political Unconscious

  Fredric Jameson•The Political Unconscious•2015

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