Thinking Things
Steven Connor
Abstract for plenary talk at ESSE 9What is it to think? What does it feel like? What is it made of? I'm going to want to say that it is made of things. Surprisingly few writers or philosophers have worried about these questions. Most of the most celebrated considerations of the question of thinking, from Descartes to Heidegger and beyond, in fact concern themselves only with the contents or components of mental experience - consciousness, cognition, reasoning, emotion - rather than the ways in which thinking thinks about itself, in general or as such.
One of the few psychoanalysts to have come at the question of thinking in this way is W.R Bion, and I will want to second and augment his arguments for the materiality of thought - that is, for the view that thinking is not merely directed towards objects, but borrows its own form from them. For Bion, followed by Didier Anzieu, the primary object by means of which thinking is able to image itself is the breast, as the form of an originary container.
I want to see if one can generate a more extensive thesaurus of things that are, in Sherry Turkle's phrase, 'good to think with' and that thereby may be understood as entering into the composition of thinking - threads, fabrics, gas, dust, bubbles, pastes, boxes, pockets, walls. Since it is itself often construed in terms of a kind of physics, language may be thought of as the ideal quasi-material in and on which thought does much of its dreamwork.
A discussion of a number of writers who have a strongly material relation to their language - among them Woolf and Beckett (Bion's analysand) - may enable me plausibly to claim writing as not just the carrier but also the form or stuff of thought - the elementary thinking thing.