Repeated Views
2 min readJan 9, 2023
- A review is an act of repetition. It repeats what its composer has heard before and what they perceive to have been heard before.
- By repeating, what has been heard, it gets rewritten. This repetition doesn’t appear as such for the composer, hence they perceive this activity without this denotation as writing and consider themselves as a writer, not as a rewriter.
- To a person seeing the product of rewriting, it appears as writing. This is true for the (re)writer as well as anyone who sees it. Such conceptualization creates a distance from the labor rewriting involves. The concept of author is no different from concepts of writer and writing.
- A review is a reified image of evaluation. It is an abstraction we may call judgement or opinion, removed from the producer and seeing and writing.
- Repeated seeing of the subject of a review initiates repetition of images, that is, a thought. Putting these thoughts onto paper is the reification of repetition. Hence the concept of writing.
- The repeated exposure to writing reifies the repetition of words and ways of seeing them. We may call the abstract result of this as norm.
- A concrete result of such abstraction may take the shape of a review. It is considered to be concrete by having a name, while remaining an abstraction within a series of norms, such as in writing, seeing, evaluation and so on.
- Debating what any of the aforementioned categories entail remains an arbitrary act within the norm. Hence such talk is normative by remaining within this category.
- If one leaves a normative category (e.g. review), they will find themselves in another one (e.g. writing).
- Getting away with words may lead to a territory that falls within norms rarely treaded by writing. This is perhaps as far as one able to go as long as alienation from production remains. If such material conditions cease to exist, then we shall see what the normative conception will entail.
