Ways of Thinking. Towards a Pluralistic and Inclusive Understanding of Thinking Habitus

Abstract

The paper outlines a pluralistic and inclusive understanding of thinking as an aesthetic habit. Taking as a starting point Noë’s recent idea that thinking is a graphical practice (§ 0), I propose a general and interdisciplinary interpretation of thinking as a habitus, which offers an articulation of how verbal and visual thinking unfolds and places emphasis on the entanglement between words and images inside the mind and on technologies of the word and the image outside the mind (§ 1). Then, I claim that such an interpretation can help to address two pressing phenomena of our time: the resurgence of technologies of the image, which questions the “mediatic discrimination” linked to the shared mediatic primacy of the alphabet and printing (§ 2); the vindication of subjectivities who were traditionally marginalized from knowledge practices and representations, which raises the issue of “epistemic injustice” and its undesirable consequences (§ 3).