Thought comes to us. It interpellates us. We also come to thought. What exactly do we mean when we say ‘I think’? Is there a thinking self generating thought solely from within us? Are we simply Descartes’ cogito? Thought is emergent. It springs forth, and we do not fully understand nor have full control over its coming. We have already abandoned subject-centred thinking. The subject is subjected as Michel Foucault will tell us. Hence, we may ask: is there an unconscious to thought? There appears to be so. Thought is not entirely rational. There is always an unthought to thought. Something remains unthought while we think. We cannot fully do multi-thinking as we do multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is not thoughtless, but its thought belongs to another order. Maybe the desiring machines of Gilles Deleuze might enable us to think thought in multi-tasking as well as the unconscious of thinking. Thinking is drawn or pulled from this unconscious. This pull has a temporal energy. It links the past and the future to thinking in the present. Thought also has a spatial dimension. Its intensity can trigger territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. We embody and inhabit thought.
With the coming of the digital revolution in communicative technologies, our exposure to the event-ness of social media is beyond our control, and as a result, our thought control, policing and governmentality have become greatly possible. Hence, we can notice a discussion on knowledge objects in academic circles. Knowledge objects that attract or displace our thought are mainly discourses. These knowledge objects can draw us to join or displace us from thought. This displacement of thought, as well as attraction to some other thought, has led some scholars to reconsider the determination of the thinker’s agency. Thought is ungrounded or unbundled by the kind of discourses that influence us. The speed at which these knowledge objects are dished to us also exposes our vulnerability to thought policing and manipulation. Power has indeed become psychopolitical. Byung-Chul Han has manifested this shade of biopower in our days. It no longer needs to beat the body. It seduces the psyche.
We are exposed to matter in a very intimate way by the digital world. This exposure is called mattering, as Pheng Cheah reminds us. These matter-energy flows displace or in-place our thought. Returning to mattering, we can see how thought is conditioned by forces of nature and culture, by laterite, by algorithm, by monsoon, politics and by market. This return brings us back to the complexities of the act of thinking. It is from this perspective that I think that thought is an interrogation. There is a becoming to thought. Its authenticity lies in its ability to question the status quo. Hence, our thought makes us feel addressed as we congregate it on the plane of immanence. The plane of immanence is a machinic assemblage. Different knowledge objects travelling to us through different discourses, at different speeds, congregate on different planes of immanence. Machinic assemblage is an unconscious surface where thoughts congregate. It is the law of the father that allows or disallows the kind of thought that comes into it. Law of the father here is not a patriarchal figure alone. It is symbolic law, the code, the norm, the party line, the algorithm, the market logic that filters what can be thought.
Having tried to study the law of father that filters the travel of thought, we can think about how a thought that repels seeks new machinic assemblage. Perhaps it is now time to think thought in Goa to discern the unconscious that binds it to some machinic assemblages and not others. This would mean we have to consider the complexity of thinking as well as knowledge objects that are embedded in discourses that offer subject positions to Goans.
For our consideration, we may take nationalist discourses that have nationalism, Hindu faith and secular faith as their knowledge objects and little or no Goa-centric elements. They offer a subject position of Indian first, Goan second. They ask Goans to think Goa through Delhi. Then there are other discourses that have knowledge objects that exhibit primacy of Goa, Goans and Goan-ness, language, land, comunidade, khazan, susegad. Other discourses centre around land, health, safety, infrastructure, corruption, price rise, jobs. These are material discourses that touch everyday life. There are other discourses that use the colonial past to invent faith as a divisive weapon, that turn the Portuguese past into a permanent wound and turn the present into revenge.
Goans being exposed to these and other discourses have the challenge of thinking about how their thought congregates and discerning which plane of immanence they aggregate on. If one does this exercise, one may be able to choose to rebel against lines of force that control and governmentalize our thinking, to use Foucault’s word. Governmentality does not work only through police. It works through thought that feels like our own. When we say Goa is dead and nothing can be done, who is thinking through us? When we say sell land and go abroad is only solution, whose knowledge object is thinking in us? When we say communal harmony is natural and does not need work, what machinic assemblage has captured our thought?
Free thinking is a myth. There is no free-floating cogito that generates pure thought from within. We are always inside assemblage. We can only do interrogative, rebellious thinking. The challenge is to ask why we resonate with modes of thinking that we indulge. Why does one Goan resonate with nationalist discourse that erases Goa and another with Goa First discourse that recentres Goa? There is a machinic or unconscious aspect to our thinking that is manifested by our resonance towards a machinic assemblage of thinking. Resonance is not random. It has history, it has mattering, it has the law of father that shaped us in family, school, church, temple, party, WhatsApp group.
For the sake of Goa, we have to examine our resonance. We have to ask: which knowledge objects have right to gather on our plane of immanence? Which discourses deserve our energy? Which thoughts that come to us deserve hospitality and which demand expulsion? This is not censorship. It is discernment. It is what ancient monks called discretio.
This brings us to the task of examined thought. Socratic dictum can guide us again. Socrates thought that an unexamined life is not worth living. May I declare? Unexamined thought is not worth thinking. Examined thought is real thinking. Examined thought leads to chosen, value-laden thinking and unthinking.
Unexamined thought repeats what is given. It repeats that development means concrete, that progress means sale, that security means wall, that identity means exclusion. Examined thought interrogates. It asks: Who benefits when I think like this? What machinic assemblage is fed when I resonate like this? What Goa is produced when I think like this? What Goan-ness is killed when I think like that?
Goa today is a battle of thought before it is a battle of votes. Hyperobjects that Morton describes- tourism, climate, capital- cannot be fought only with manifestos. They have to be fought at the level of machinic unconscious where thought congregates. That means we need new planes of immanence, new assemblages where knowledge objects of land, health, safety, infrastructure, jobs, dignity, communidade, ecology gather together and produce new resonance. Goa, if it is to be more than a slogan, must become such a plane. Not party alone but a machinic assemblage where Goan thought can gather, be filtered by law that says Goa matters, Goan matters, Goan-ness matters.
To think in Goa therefore is to examine thought. It is to track mattering that conditions us. It is to rebel not by shouting louder but by choosing where our thought congregates, which discourses we feed, which knowledge objects we let interpellate us. In the end, politics begins not when we have opinion, but when we examine why we have the opinion we have.
That is the beginning of freedom, not as free thinking, but as thinking that knows its chains and chooses which chains to break and which bonds to keep.
