Jody Greene
LIT 101
19 Janurary 2011
An Alien Encounter - Explained!
When asked, "How in the world did you come up with such a tale?" many an author would reply, "I'm not sure, I just wrote it." If an individual could just "create," if he could just draw from his knowledge and articulate it in a certain way, the most learned man in the world should have an abundance of works around the globe. Yet, he does not. The process of creation must contain an unknown catalyst that allows one author to be more creative, chilling, or enticing than another. Creation must encompass more than the devising and execution of a plan.Thoughts, like a butterfly's wings, flutter in and out of one's conscious; they depart just as soon as the mind can grasp them. These fluttering thoughts - identified by Derek Attridge as the other, pose a possible explanation for the process of creation. He defines the other as, "that which is at a given moment, outside the horizon provided by the culture for thinking, understanding, imagining, feeling, perceiving" (19). The other does not displace old ideas, it simply reworks them into ideas that are essentially the same; but different because it has influenced them. The other requires the creator to think in an uncommon fashion, thus an encounter with it occurs only when the being enters another state of mind. He must be passive, unaware of his encounter, but alert to his mind. Finally evoking the other may emerge from many failed attempts at doing so. Unlike his regular thoughts, the creator cannot command the other's presence. The other separates itself from a being's natural thought process, but somehow relates to his individual. If the other fails to relate to the individual, the other ceases to exist, because the individual could not possibly create something out of nothing. The other materializes from a being's knowledge, and is the reworking of that knowledge, so it cannot be entirely foreign.
Every mind contains its own unique other. Where does this "being of thought" come from? Are humans without the capability to fully comprehend their own knowledge? Attridge explains his theory on the creation of the other in an attempt to answer these questions.He begins by stating that each person possesses an individual other because each person possess an individual idioculture. Idioculture is "the name for the totality of the cultural codes constituting a subject, at a given time, as an overdetermined, self-contradictory system that manifests itself materially in a host of ways" (22). Basically, an idioculture embodies an individual's thoughts about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at a given time; it emerges into the world in different forms - art, literature, speech - anything. An idioculture is unfathomable in size - so unfathomable in fact, that human minds can only perpetrate a fraction of it at any given time. A fraction of a wall would not be the most effective at keeping foreigners out, and because perpetrated human idioculture is fractional, the other can seep through the cracks, and into thought. The moment at which the other enters conscious thought is an event, a single happening. It is also an act - because the will of the individual must make the mind alert and attentive in order for the discovery of the other to take place. Derek Attridge concludes his theory with, "Creation is both an act and an event, both something that is done intentionally by an effort of the will and something that happens without warning to a passive, though alert, consciousness" (26).
I really dislike the cliche about butterflies. Hah. Too lazy to really fuck with it though...
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