Thinking is Being is Visual: The Inevitable Shift

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Elizabeth Rudy, eds. Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2017)., 2017

French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has enigmatically declared that "Montage is the art of producing this form that thinks." What does it mean for an image to think? The fundamental principles of montage, such as juxtaposition and shock are well known. Perhaps, however, there is another way to speak of montage, when it is deployed as a mode of knowledge. By claiming that images are capable of thinking, this essay argues that Didi-Huberman is taking up Gilles Deleuze’s proposal that cinema does not merely imitate or reflect philosophy, but produces its own philosophical project. For Deleuze, the challenge facing philosophy was to overcome the assumptions concerning what thinking is, a return to a ground zero of what representation can possibly be. Didi-Huberman’s arguments signal an alternative way of treating images beyond what Deleuze calls "representation," or thought based on resemblance, recognition and identity. To do this, Didi-Huberman retrieves montage from the historical avant-garde and explores its epistemological potential. By emphasising montage’s capacity to create new meaning and generate new lines of thought, images become theoretical objects, things that "think."

Portraying is basically the act of drawing line. The line, with which today's human being is very familiar, falls into deeper meanings than expected when the reality is considered that it is an abstract element not being actually present in the nature. Being impossible to be observed in the nature, the line is the unique indicator of the ability of the human being to achieve solid results with abstract principles, such that the people drawing the first cave pictures starting from this could comprehend "what" they were by this means. This mentioned feature of the line, being an integral part of art from day one, sets light also to the importance of art for the construction of the ontological existence of the human being. However, the habit of analyzing the cave pictures as the first concrete expression of the human being's religious orientation generated a sense of art history assessing the art over production. Thus, the art, as a creative action defining the human being ontologically, was converted into a show where the "actor-observer" limit is very much underlined. For this reason, the Ready Made objects of Duchamp can be perceived as a very strong attempt to remind again the forgotten ontological ground of the creative action specific to the human being. Assessing the art as limited to production, the known approach claims that the ready made objects of Duchamp remove the mentioned creative action. With this approach in force, the historical avant-garde removed all elements of production related to form and believed in that it left the art alone with its primary and pure state. The action presented by Deniz Sagdic under the title " Ready-ReMade " is within this regard a showdown against the thought that discussed the art on the ground of production, namely form almost throughout history. This showdown starts with the selection of production objects as a formal ground for content production after they are used by persons for production purposes, namely they become "produced objects". Sagdic called the consumption range of production objects in the relative situation as " produced object ". Considering the historical evolution of the production objects; the fact that the hand-crafted objects made at home in the communities, where the first settled life had begun, had become an exchange object in time at feast areas increased the social importance of these small productions having the origin of art within themselves. The objects fired or carved from materials such as wood, stones or bones were then converted into the symbolist meaning witnessing the memories in the past, and became the seeds sprouting the facts that we call "history". This feature of objects became the personal objects enabling the human being to be accepted as individual within society within the scope of an internalization mechanism, and in one sense made it possible for the society members to gain the character of "person". Considered today as the origin of goods exchange, the object exchanges performed in the socialization areas of the first settled life were, rather than a materialistic expectation, one of the main dynamics enabling the human being to individualize. Related to the production; the industrial revolution, when the most important breakdown after agriculture was experienced, is such a milestone also in terms of the creation of new social categories. Created for the existing needs starting from the discovery of agriculture and relatively throughout the periods after the industrial revolution, the production mechanisms were converted into the model of designing needs rather than satisfying needs as of 60s that started a new era named as the new industrial era by some people. Thus, the production objects corresponding to the produced needs became the consumption objects. Apart from the consumption objects' social functions defining the "identity" of the individual, the world encircled with consumption objects reconstructed the nature, from which the human being got disconnected an immemorial time ago, with these consumption products. In this regard, the function of the consumption object produced and the termination of this function created a relative intermediate area. Although today's human being is not aware of this intermediate area, it feels it such that it leaves the consumed object as a full waste near the garbage rather than in its impenetrable depth. Deniz Sagdic endeavors to enlarge this intermediate

It is my aim in this paper to elucidate the nature of ideas. I will argue that an idea, far from being a useful asset or tool, comes down to a disposition to overcome, whether in thinking or in acting, an impasse. Generating ideas cannot fail to affect the generator's structure of subjectivity itself, enabling them to look 'beyond' a given impasse.

Transtechnology Research Reader 2013: Deep History, Contingency and the Sublime, 2013

"This paper represents the most recent attempt in an on-going project to formulate an account of artistic creation (in relation to the visual ar- tefact) that leaves behind the prevailing notion that the human practitioner works upon, and is separate from, an inert material world. This idea is seen, in particular, in some of the con- temporary approaches of psychology (Hodg- kinson et al., 2008), where creative processes such as intuition and inspiration are under- stood as ‘impulses’ or ‘feelings from within’; they are classed as somatic and affective hy- potheses about the world that occur prior to rational thought, encased within the experien- tial dimension of the human body. Such ac- counts presuppose a clear boundary between the body in which the intuition or inspiration is ‘encased’ and the external world out of which it forms its hypotheses. This model of creativity is embedded within particular ‘matter-form’ models of creation, such as that of ‘hylomorphism’ (Simondon, 1992), which have become axiomatic across much of Western art and media theory,1 histo- ry and philosophy.2 This theory maintains that an artefact (a statue, for example, or a basket) is created by the imposition of a pre-defined form (morphe) by the practitioner upon an external inert material (hyle). Its creation is understood in terms of a design specification applied to a material, which can be traced back to a pre-designed form in the mind of the hu- man agent. This paper, in contrast, proceeds from the claim that the mind cannot be confined to the brain or body of the practitioner, as accounts of the ‘extended mind’ reveal,3 but extends into the wider components and processes of the environment, which include that of an en- ergised matter. As such, what can be termed as the ‘inspiration’, ‘impulse’ or indeed ‘intuition’ underlying the human creative process cannot be fully accounted for by human agency, but requires a framework that can encompass a more distributed account of human creativity."

Walter Benjamin's Denkbilder (or "thinking images" to quote Henry Sussman's convincing translation of the term) present thoughts in a kind of symbiosis with sensual experience. Abstraction and sensation, thought and bodily practices, are exposed as intrinsic to one another; attitudes and atmospheres are exposed on the verge of reflection and abstraction; insights emerge from the experienced environment like a gecko suddenly appearing in a stone wall, only when the glance is distracted from the usual focus. Benjamin tends to bring sensual phenomena to the point where they speak for themselves.

Fragmentation of the Photographic in the Digital Age (Daniel Rubinstein, ED)., 2020

The image of thought, indeed thought ‘itself’ has endured a long and somewhat tedious history, with debates circling around the role of representation, reason and rationality. Those debates have often infected the very terrain of the photograph (and, for that matter, image) and have done so to such a degree that often image is either presented as the metaphysical god-fairy of the photograph, with the latter acting as documentation for, or representation of, the former; or, as more recently the case, where skill inherent in the world of imaging is left to one side or ignored altogether. This chapter will offer a completely different approach. It begins by staging a minor narrative of our contemporary world in the form of ‘Alexa’. It then double-strands that narrative with, on the one hand, an interlacing of Newtonian physics, modern political thought and the importance of ‘exit[ing]’ for the material-conceptual development and inhabiting of what it means to be human – and indeed, what society might become, in the best sense of community, possibility, invention, democracy. On the other hand, it draws upon an interlacing of post-Newtonian physics, big data, artificial intelligence and the importance of ‘encounter[ing]’ in order to develop a wholly different picture of what it means or could mean to be human, and with it, what it means or could mean (ethically, politically, democratically, substantially) to be alive in this wildly shifting world of bots, conceptually activated vectors, multidimensional time warps. The chapter ends with a provocation: that these double-strands have something in common. It is the quiet, but no less peculiar, use of an old logical tool called the counterfactual, an alt-objective x from which the entirety of the philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and/or political scaffolding unfolds. In the former case, that is, in the pre-information age of industrial capitalism ‘case’, one could name (and did name) this counterfactual ‘the state of nature.’ In a postmodern age of complexity, derivatives, big data, distributed and artificial intelligence, that is, the post-Newtonian, neo-liberalist ‘case’, that counterfactual could be named, and is named: the photograph.

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In this essay I will discuss the work of John Baldesarri and in particular his 1971 piece I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. To place the work in the appropriate context I first intend to discuss the nature and philosophy surrounding the emergence of conceptual art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, briefly considering the nature of the idea as related to conceptual art and the shift from an art that required a visual experience to one in favour of the cerebral. I will then discuss the work in light of these considerations and finally, briefly attempt to consider it in terms of some wider conceptual propositions.

JOLMA, 2020

Two years ago, in 2018, a long-awaited publication saw the light: The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, edited by Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher. In the words of Tom Froese, a contributor to the volume, such an important collection of articles and critical notes just a few pages shy of one thousand having found a collective place with a highly prestigious publisher "ma[de] the field of '4E Cognition' official" (emphasis added). But what is this field like? What kind of scholars is involved? Mostly, it is philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists who are interested in the idea of why and how thinking is, so to speak, never only thinking. More explicitly, what unites scholars interested in 4E Cognition is the notion that, at least in some (but not infrequent) cases, mental processes are dependent, at different degrees, on extra-cranial and/or extra-bodily factors. This notion is almost on the whole antithetical to the fundamental tenets of classical cognitive science, which conceives the human mind as a substantially disembodied software controlling a hardware, i.e. the body. Despite the large-scale recognition granted by the Oxford Handbook, however, the label '4E' (which canonically stands for embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) is problematic in its own right. Its 'numerical' character suggests the presence of a fragmented plurality of positions among its proponents. This is actually the case. The main problem is that the different E's are not always brought together in perfect harmony or not even compatible at all. Radical Enactivism, for instance, is at odds with the extended mind model on the thorny issue of internal mental representations as well as on the computationalist account of the mind. In general, there is continuity and dialogue between the proponents of these cognate approaches, yet points of disagreement persist.