Possibilities of Thought

Written by: Artxell Knaphni on July 21, 2012.
Last revised on:December 18, 2012.

 Thought is…?
Already, it begins, the question that requests a presentation, demanding a litany of objects, of ‘knowns’, and a configuration of this litany according to a novel combinatorics, in the hope that such arrangements might produce a fresh series of effects: the ‘growth’ of ‘culture’, the extension of ‘knowledge’, the ontico-epistemic expansion of the territories of ‘Being’…?
All worthy projects, ‘no doubt’?

   Philosophy, in its institutional forms, has been busy archiving, classifying, and otherwise industrialising, the driven contemplations of various canonical traditions, as grist for the mill of future recombinant streams of commodified ‘wisdom’: a grist that will sustain the perennial tensions of these venerated traditions, with new brands of ‘logic’, intensified ‘epistemologies’, concentrated ‘ontologies’, nouveau-‘mysticisms’, etc.. All of this, circulating within the same circles of interpretation; playing the same topoi; in rhetorical oscillations, where the current jargons of reduction will scintillate with the shine of ‘progress’. A ‘progress’ in which the same, age-old platitudes can be uttered incessantly, as if they were unearthly revelations, never before thought or expressed.
   All this, we have seen, and it has not proved sufficient.

   Tracing the contours of this insufficiency, so as to free us from its net, is one of the tasks to be accomplished. It is not an easy task, there is considerable work involved, but the parameters are readily apparent, the leap out of the net can be made.