I've been re-reading a text by philosopher Michel Serres recently that is so distinctive in flavour and perspective that I feel ready to create something new. One of his notable contributions is the role that he believes prepositions have in connecting things. Generally, verbs and nouns are seen as the important parts of a sentence and things like prepositions (at, from, under, around) are percieved as fillers of some sort. Not so. Serres says that prepositions "...put into relationship the two ends of an interesting space." He sometimes speaks of them as the "pimps of language" because they are the go-betweens, they set things up, bring things together. And they are very stable, free of gender, and can move almost anywhere. "Prepositions don't change, but they change everything around them."
Often, when organizations or people want to be more creative or ingenuity driven, they automatically think of adding something, of adopting an 'accumulative' posture. What is lost in that approach is a failure to search for ways of re-connecting what is already there. The posture of a preposition is to bring together ideas, people, spaces, places and plans in new and exciting arrangements. Try it. Without adding anything, just think about what would happen if you re-ordered what is already there. Start with your desk or office. Adopt that posture for solving a problem. Explore the world of the lowly preposition.
1 comment:
His idea about prepositions being unchanging but critical due to the way the connect things reminds me of how soap works - it binds with water molecules and with oil molecules. Water and oil don't bind but with soap molecules between, they can connect. For more sensitive people, perhaps we could consider prepositions the ambassadors or diplomats of language.
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