On Writing as Thinking 

How do you use writing to aid your thinking in your professional/intellectual/scholarly/research practice?


Lydia Kallipoliti
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture

February 2025
Issue 1

The Greek word parthenogenesis means in English asexual stem cell production in plants. But in Greek it means virgin birth.

 
The word originates from the myth of Athena being born out of the head of Zeus and implies a state of mental excess, where the mind momentarily generates pure ideas, unprecedented and unmixed with anything existing in the physical world. The common vision of the individual writer struggling with the emptiness of the first page, until an untainted idea coalesces all thoughts in an enlightened linear journey originates from parthenogenesis, which has been sustained and mythologized in western culture.

For me, writing is conceptually founded on the opposite of this notion; it embodies a praxis of re-writing,  which emerges as a germinal creative drive, through the desire for transformation of existing information, concepts, and floating ideas lingering in a state of detachment in one’s mind.  If we assume that nothing emerges ‘out of zero’, writing is the process of recycling, externalizing, and stitching together ideas, thoughts and pieces of a mental heap of waste. Recycling does not only refer to materials and physical matter; I see writing as an act of recycling. It is an ideational and philosophical system of viewing the world of ideas, information and matter as flow rather than as the accumulation of discrete objects. More than a material system, recycling signals the migration of life through the conversion of one thing to another.