If the world and experience is of one matter, then is thought not also this same one, such that the glass, the chair, the bowl, the plastic keyboard, the pan flute in the corner, are not merely reflections of thought, but quite literally are thought? Thought is the out-side, for the distinction between inside and outside ebbs through the techniques of looking, the perspectives of speaking, the means of understanding.
My bike lock is thought.
I love this idea.
MSJ
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I love that last sentence you write here Mark: so changing the order to the perspectives of speaking, the techniques of looking, the means of understanding this respectively folds over Jane's quoting of Bill Brown: "in the name of avowing the force of questions that have been too
ReplyDeletereadily foreclosed by more familiar fetishizations: the fetishization of
the subject, the image, the word" (page 19 of VM; page 6-7 of Brown 2001).
You also poetically raise the theme that thinking upon what thought is, is perhaps a key strategy for the new materialism Jane believes in and for. Perhaps we should have a post on this singular theme of thought in materialist terms? I think Catherine Malabou's notion of plasticity is one approach; another, for now, this exchange:
Questioner: "Are you a 'monster'?
Gilles Deleuze: "To be a monster is first of all to be composite. And it's true that I have written on apparantly diverse subjects. But 'monster' has another meaning: something or someone whose extreme determinancy allows the indeterminate wholly to subsist (for example a monster a la Goya). In this sense, thought itself is a monster". (November, 1981; Deleuze, 2007: 39).
The 'monster' manifesto of non-rep: down with the fetishization of subject, image, word! Rise up the inside outside ebbs and flows of affective molecular forces! The materially singular determinates of indeterminancy; such that, indeed, the bike lock thought you last night (I bet you just unlocked it and went home though! - which, on a serious note, raises the question of pragmatism and habit).
Brown, Bill (2001) “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 : 1–22.
Deleuze, Gilles (2007) "Responses to a Series of Questions", in Collapse III, Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 39-43.
Malabou, C. (2008) What should we do with our brain? New York, NJ: Fordham University Press.
Hi JD and Mark, I have been following this blog from the sidelines and reading along. I really miss these discussions being away from Bristol!
ReplyDeleteJust to say I was thinking of Malabou when I read Marks post and see that JD has already pointed it out.
I think the question of the bike lock thinking also brings up the point of percept in Deleuze, the other half of the affect debate which is never mentioned. The percept of the triptychs in Francis Bacon for example.
Just a thought.