“For no thought can be thought before it is thought, and thinking a thought has a certain element of materiality to it, found within speech and writing. Contrary to Aristotle’s Peri hermenaias, where speech is a sign of thought and writing is a sign of speech, such that thought is conceived as an origin or spirit that precedes speech and writing, there is always something nachträglich in thought. One never truly knows what they think until after they have done, said, or written it.” Levi R. Bryant
Over the last month I have been attempting to make notes of my thoughts while I am making with the intention of understanding what makes me do to a material, what I do. This has got me thinking about thoughts. The creative thoughts that I have are a chaotic mass of fleeting brain activity and how I actually make any sense of it all, at times, amazes me. I cannot help but associate it to hyperlinks, where you can spend time clicking on one that takes you to another and another and so on until you can’t remember where you started. Then you start to go into your history to try and backtrack, to make some sense of the path you have taken, but it is inevitably lost as to the original trail somehow, without some excruciating detailed method of mapping. Well that’s how it is for me anyway. Similarly, I recently came across Author and Professor of Philosophy Levi R. Bryant and his blog Larval Subjects, how I got there, heaven knows but he interestingly speaks to the notion of thoughts and his own in an introduction to one of his posts. I interpret his description of his thoughts as jumbled noise that he hopes will become a thought and if it is anything like my thoughts it’s about trying to create some sort of order so that they can be communicated or even understood by myself!
With this in mind, I have also likened my thoughts to my making process. My thoughts are actually fragments, they are not complete, for completion to happen, my thoughts need to materialize into a solid form where the fragments of thoughts become lost in the chaos of the objects manifestation and existence.
Object making is a language. In The Hidden Dimension, Edward T Hall, references Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s as stating that “Language, [….] is more than just a medium for expressing thought. It is, in fact, a major element in the formation of thought.” I conclude that my objects form my thoughts not that my thoughts form my objects.
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/unruly-heritage/ viewed 27/4/19
Hall, Edward T, The Hidden Dimension, New York, Anchor, 1990