Leena and Oula A Valkeapää are living with reindeer in the Arctic Sápmi where they follow the Sàmi herding tradition. Oula contributed this question, Who is thinking in you? to my evolving publication project, Environmental Justice Questions. The question is haunting because it proposes and presumes a thinking within your thinking you may or may not recognise. Challenging you to turn towards your own mind, to undermine and excavate yourself, to ask ‘do others think within me?’ and in doing so that ‘me’ is destabilised. So the haunting is not solely metaphorical, it raises the question of other minds actively entangled with your mind – can we accept being haunted without being disturbed?
The grammar of the question is strange. We are more familiar with, ‘who influences you’, that phrasing cordons your thinking from the thinking of others temporarily, but the ‘thinking in you’ implies a liveness and active presence. To consider how others might think within us, we need to think through how our thinking can circulate without us.
One indicator of knowing someone well can be the degree to which we know how they think. To have some insight as to how others think and act preemptively requires a simultaneous modelling of what you think that person’s thinking might be, while thinking on their thinking. This is mirrored in computing by emulators; (hardware or software) that enables one computer system to operate like another. When trying to predict how others might react to things we do, or say, we simulate their thought to help make our own decisions or understand someone’s behaviour, or possible responses. The simulation is not the thinking, but points to how we have the capacity to consciously bring one person’s thought into our own.
Still, thinking implies a liveness, a real-timeliness perhaps this can be approached through thinking about how we engage with the thoughts of others, that thoughts need thinking to be activated. In this sense we very rarely are thinking our own thoughts, but activating multiple thoughts of others and responding to them with our own or responding to them even with the thoughts of others.
What prompted this question in the first place? Perhaps a call to be more self-reflexive as to how we have come to make the decisions we make and to try to expand our own awareness of the multiple lineages of thought we carry with us and are affected by. More expansively there are a host of other beings; ghosts, spirits, possessions, elemental forces that in different cosmologies may share our minds with us. How far is it even possible to be aware of who is thinking in us – as there is never any clean slate to begin from, so we only observe our thought through the lens of our current thinking. I see the question as a self-regulating one, a koan even, that cultivates a kind of intellectual humility to forever ask through what ideology or -ism might you be uncritically operating.
*
Oula A Valkeapää’s question is complemented by one from performance-maker, Kate McIntosh, ‘Whose fantasies are we living in?’ Between these questions is the interiority and exteriority of our spheres of thought.
As with considering who is thinking in us, so we exist in multiple overlapping and contradictory fantasies. Fantasies of nation states, fantasies of continuous growth, fantasies of the necessity of profit, fantasies of eternal life. These fantasies emerge from specific texts and ideologies that can be traced to by historians of thought to certain movements, advertising agendas, religious doctrine, propaganda and corporate literature. Inevitably one fantasy emerges to counter, or offset another.
The word fantasy has different related meanings, there is fantasy as in a mental image, and fantasy that is closer to illusion, the delirious or mythical, the latter promises something pleasurable and fun.
Who are the dominant image makers? These weavers of narrative are economists, captains of industry, corporate board rooms, philosophers, historians, filmmakers, poets, teachers, religious teachings – the authors of which themselves are subject to inherited fantasies of others.
Our fantasies are authored with multiple architects at multiple scales, multiple interpretations and misinterpretations. A fantasy of a holiday might emerge in relation, and counter to exhaustive working conditions in one’s localised sphere, which in turn are the product of fantasies of profit and growth under a dominant globalised capitalist regime. In this sense personal fantasy is produced in reaction to what constricts us and is also permeated by what we are encouraged to dream for by dominant social imaginaries. Even in solitude we never fantasise alone, but in relation to perceived or actual lacks, many of which are strategically manufactured. . . or the relics of previous fantasies on which or with which new ones are constructed.
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and an associate artist with Greenpeace UK on the project Bad Taste. He recently presented work in the group show, SOIL: The World at Our Feet. In 2024, he was in the two person show, DONO, at Somerset House Studios project space G31 alongside Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and the solo show Conjunction at VOLT, Devonshire Collective in Eastbourne. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2025.
Recent group exhibitions include Sonic Acts 2024: The Spell of The Sensuous, Amsterdam, Chronic Hunger / Chronic Desire in Timișoara, Romania, BALATORIUM Disturbed Waters, in Veszprém, Hungary as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme and Bamako Biennial, 2020 in Mali. Harun is also a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths University, London as part of the Art and Ecology Research Centre. He is also part of the faculty of the Dutch Art Institute, MA Art Praxis and Conditions in Croydon, London.
Share:
