Error

When the author of Notes Toward a Deformed Humanities says ‘what is broken is beautiful like origami’ I believe he means that these broken things are not in the shape intended by the creators, but are still beautiful and capable of holding meaning in other forms. Additionally, the notion of ‘purposefully misreading a text’ supports the idea that while things can be altered from their intended shape they may still hold positive value to others. I like the part about reading backwards to discover the working parts of the text because it sheds light on the idea that literary works have the ability to be anything because they’re made up of components that are parts of a universal and infinite set of possible structures. Deformative scholarship could be considered damaging because it consists of the destruction/deformation of someone else’s intellectual property and emotional creation, which seems inherently wrong but necessary for humanitarian progress. Technology adds a new dimension to deformation practices because it allows us to more easily single out specific pieces of each work and construct in a less random fashion. The beauty of the broken state of a creation is unavailable until we break it, especially if the break consists of random fragments, formations that would otherwise be unfathomable. This is more common with physical things than literary works, but the general principles remain the same. I specifically like how the author tells that he was not the creator of deformation but only gave a name to the idea, because it shows the ability of things to exist without our conscious knowledge of them which suggests that there are an infinite number of possibilities of the universe’s existence. I find this especially interesting because it reminds me of the Library of Babel in the sense that there is an infinite set of things we could know or have known but we don’t necessarily possess them as common knowledge even though they exist or exist in possibility. ~LCS