AustLit

Author's note: The Cell of My Art as an Amoeba is a philosopoietic essay. Theory is manoeuvred with poesies, as creative thinking and experimentation is informed by theory. Rainer Maria Rilke’s concept, the cell of my art, invites philosopoiesis, and the outcome, here, is a mouth poetics. The cell of my art is an imagining with mouths. The cell of my art is becoming-mind as mouth, and mouth as amoeba. Mouthness is an articulation of openings and enfoldments, and an amoeba is a body of mouths, feeding on multiplicities of being and otherness. The cell of my art becoming-mind suffers indigestion and vomitous reconfiguration to accommodate newness. Mouthness is used as a ‘molecular’ language to bring bio/semiotic concepts and world-making ontologies into my thought experiment: the cell of my art becoming-mind, receptive to complex semiotic and material loops and flows of my Umwelt, is feeding into my understanding of what is mind and sign. This essay is a writerly embodiment of mouthness making itself into a body of mouths, desirous of ‘everything’ in its mouths, a ‘total’ impossible articulation. My philosopoiesis brings what it can of my poetic engagement out into the open, making my deeper processes—mind in a Play of Musement, a state of playful passivity, in open-ended relationships with/in my Umwelt—more explicit, along with my partnerships with many writers. Other writers and theorists, including Wendy Wheeler, Gregory Bateson, Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Floyd Merrell and Clarice Lispector, are brought into the Peircean folds of this essay. '

Epigraph: ‘Somehow I too must find a way of making things; not plastic, written things, but realities that arise from the craft itself. Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything.’ —Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 10 August 1903 (trans. Joel Agee)