Journal #2

Seriously, this post is in dire need of a more clever title.

Does collaboration eliminate individual thought? This is something that keeps coming up as I mull over this and last week's readings. Collaboration, that omnipresent, idealized concept, is loosely defined as social writing: peer response assignments, participation in writers' groups, anything in which people exchange ideas and information in order to positively influence each other's writing (or at least that's what I wrote down in my notebook during our last meeting). Regardless of the subject of the group's writing, the overarching goal of collaboration is self discovery. By engaging in conversations and receiving feedback from other writers, the individual further develops their own point of view.

Well, that's lovely. But, returning to the question, does this social writing take away individuality? Perhaps I've been blinded by society's blatant mistrust of collaborative work, but the thought of group writing bothers me. It makes me think of groupthink, and groupthink makes me think of communism, which makes me think of the Cultural Revolution in China, and that makes me think of that rather disturbing scene from "The Last Emperor" when the students were taking great pleasure in humiliating their former professors in the streets of Beijing, and that makes me think of the collaborative work the Emperor and his servants did while writing their life stories when they were serving a lengthy sentence in a re-education camp because the the Emperor had had some rather shady dealings with the Japanese, who had created a nation in the Manchurian region of northern China and named in Manchukuo, which was an action that was ironically condemned by all imperialist Western nations, and...oh, you don't care. I often forget that not all people are history majors. Anyway.

What I keep wondering is, if everything I have ever written and will ever write has been influenced by things I have read or people I have talked to, does that mean that I have never had and never will have an original thought? Does that mean that anyone who has ever written anything, anyone who has ever developed a ground breaking idea in any field, is guilty of plagiarism?

And if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it...?

I don't know, I have the feeling I'm not making a lot of sense. But the concept of collaboration is reaffirming my fear that no one is saying anything that hasn't been said before. All of the odd thoughts that float through our brains as we daydream have already been thought. Humanity is set on the spin cycle and history as we know it has come to an end--at least it has if you take Fukyama's viewpoint. My, that's depressing. So somewhere, at some point in history, someone else has had the same thoughts I'm writing out right now (Well, at some point in recent history, as the Cultural Revolution only happened in the last forty years or so, and "The Last Emperor" was made about twenty years ago). I am not an original. Fortunately, I am convinced that there is something more than this copycat life. Perhaps I can have an original thought when I reach the other side. At least I have that to look forward to.

Then again, as billions, perhaps trillions of people have died since the beginning of time...No, I won't even go there.

To cheer you up after this rather melancholy post, here's an awesome song by the amazingly talented Alexi Murdoch, who is my future husband. He just doesn't know it yet.