In all areas we are regulated and constrained by those ideas and interpretations we consider valid, by those ideas and interpretations we consider appropriate. This has clear merits and uses, but whether an artwork, a text or a theory, the idea of a correct understanding has a chilling effect that is a barrier to the genesis of new ideas and new objects, to new worlds and new selves.

For the dominant paradigms that is the point. As the term appropriate shifts from verb to adjective, it shifts from genesis to stasis. It no longer makes new meaning, but instead consolidates it. Rather than construct a new world, it enforces an old one.

The trajectory of an artefact is similar. An individual and their idea is at a nexus of appropriations that bind together to form something new. And as that new thought becomes more entangled it becomes increasingly appropriate, until it reaches a point where it becomes inevitable.