I’m reading N. Katherine Hayles on nonconscious cognition at the moment. She makes connections to Thrift and non-representational theory a fair bit in her writing. Her argument is mostly a neuroscientific one in that sensation->perception->nonconscious cognition->conscious cognition are part of the same process which ultimately make representations possible for humans. What I see lacking in the posts on this topic so far is that when it comes to the very act of thinking the non-representational and the representational are temporally related in that one precedes the other. There is no cognitive without the pre-cognitive (or as Hayles says, we’d all be psychotic, because we simply wouldn’t cope with the amount of information coming in).
Where this becomes important politically, is that it is possible to intervene in that pre-cognitive window and influence what reaches consciousness. This is a mutual concern for Hayles and Thrift, which she writes about in her book Unthought and which Thrift has recently written about in the foreword to a forthcoming book I’ve co-edited with Christian Edwardes. Corporations are harnessing this in order to influence consumers, politicians are harnessing this in order to influence voters. I would have thought both were of shared concern for political ecology. While I can also agree with Reed in that the non-representational and representational aren’t pragmatically separable, I think there is a case for selective attention to the non-representational/pre-cognitive/nonconscious cognition – or whatever we choose to call it – for the very reason that the ability to interfere with it has such profound social and political implications.
Cheers,
Candice
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