City thinks Nature

What happens when you are thinking? Thought and language seem very obviously linked. While maybe no one dreams type-written pages, in a moment of distanced communications we might take for granted the possibility of a greater correlation between words and intuition, which is to say we might even experience the correlation between text and thought, if only through everyday messaging.

“One might as well believe that in order to speak we go hunting for words that we string together afterwards by means of a thought. The truth is that above the word and above the sentence there is something much more simple than a sentence or even a word: the meaning.”[i] Where is the meaning?

Being thrown in the world casts some doubt on the prospect of figuring out thinking, it might never be literally tangible. Social and environmental spaces work to coproduce what is an undeniably collective, accumulative thought patterning, more movement and structure, container, or sort of back drop, than text. And yet this implicit thinking seems still to necessitate translation, transcription, talking. It is nevertheless incessantly muttering to itself, even if only in soft codes, captions, monologues both internal and extroverted. It is possible that knowing the route back home is impossible without the words to describe it.

The concept of embodied knowledge here is very interesting. This is the corporal automation of basic, learned action, which theoretically frees the mind for concentration on more complex things. So, for example, I don’t need to think about how to write particular letters, because I learned how to spiral the e, cross the t, make that odd connection with the b. Not worrying about how to make an s allows me to think more about what I’m trying to say.

That’s a particularly minute action for example – when you think of the complicated movement of dancers, builders, the concept becomes more clear. These are often internal, engrained or enculturated activities – maneuvers that are explicitly taught, learned. So then is it possible or even desirable to turn the notion of embodied knowledge on its head, so to speak,, to ask about the potential impacts of space, on thought?

This shouldn’t suggest a very symmetrical arrangement of affect, but a continuous emergence rolling together a potentially limitless series of spaces – social, architectural, environmental, temporal, as well as literal. This, maybe disembodied thinking, might lead to some very productive problems. How does proximity influence thought? Crowds, isolation? How do design elements, decorations, colo(u)r? Politics. What is the potential of past events to sort of invisibly stain a particular place?

This begins to sound like a symbolic reification of things. I don’t want to suggest that a given environment will be so simply translated into collective consciousness that a masterplan would be capable of transforming society – at least not in the way any designer could anticipate. The edges between representation and reality here are really the crux of that assumption. I’m not talking about representation.

“The world is a text containing several meanings, and we pass from one meaning to another by an effort – an effort in which the body always participates, just as when we are learning the alphabet of a foreign language this alphabet has got to enter into our hand by dint of forming the characters. Apart from that, any change in the manner of thinking is illusory”[ii]

What continues to evade us is the knowing transferred by movement. The movement of knowing. What happens when you’re thinking, rather than a question about neurons or synapses in an isolated individual, becomes more about the continuity of all matter – now forever forward and back. This is the ungraspable point it is necessary to grasp. Thought becomes a space of infinitely expanding contraction. The distinctions between contemplating artworks, studying equations, learning language,, as particularly saturated thought-acts, begins to fade. Contemplating rain drops, swimming laps, washing dishes, are as obviously thinking. And if we can consider language a performative form, then class too, might begin to dissolve.

Maybe especially in our moment of ecstatic commuinication,[iii] when we live so often in soft ware, programmed, encoded, hyper space, the proliferation of language, devices, obliterates textual meaning, or at least flattens it, anyway, so that concrete, presenced thinking (even at superficial distances) supersedes it. Behind the assumed, explicit power of words is the growing force of implicit, intuited knowledge through the giddy, explosive appreciation of what can’t be said – perhaps languaging.[iv] But that interestingly is revealed most through obsessive, gluttonous textuality.

Then, is it like reading? Is thinking like reading, as in reading expressions, buildings, signals[v] — perhaps yes as much as reading eventually forgets specific words, to float, or hang, with the more general ideas or plots to be conveyed. How does this room think you? And that needs also include this text. How does this text think you? That room, and this text?

sb 07 2011

Late Summer Blues, an exhibition curated by Sara Reisman + Ian Daniel is on view until August 2, 2011 at Storefront.

Cockroaches in Autumn, an installation by Tracey Goodman is on view until August 21, 2011 at Regina Rex.

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[i] Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind(New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 121.

[ii] Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil (New York: Routledge, 2004).

[iii] Jean Baudriallard, “The Ecstacy of Communication” in Post-modern Reader, ed. Charles Jencks, 155 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).

[iv] See also Julia Lockheart

[v] Yvonne Rainer, A Woman Who…, (Baltimore: Hopkins University Press, 1999).

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