The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo claims that a lot of the generally accepted certainties that have sustained our culture are not certainties at all. He says that, in order to see them differently, we need to find a type of ‘weak thought’ whereby our strongest and most basic intellectual assumptions are dissolved from within and replaced with a more flexible set of possibilities, which we should avoid moulding into yet another fixed and authoritative foundation for thought.
Postmodernism has generated various experiments along these lines, with some success, but is still commonly seen as an adjunct to late modernism, whose prescribed tenets continue to rule as our major cultural models. Specialisation and cultural reductionism, along with a narrow conflation of progress with new technologies, would still seem to be the order of the day. ‘Weak thought’ stands for something else - oblique means of discovery rather than analysis, and an emphasis on interpretations over facts. It advocates a ‘turning to new purposes’ rather than an aggressive overcoming of tradition, and it recommends open, organic forms of research with more than one vocabulary. Innovation and secularisation are welcomed because they gradually undermine conditioning, creating a ‘play of interpretations’ that facilitates a shift towards a more open, charitable society less fixated on the old truths.
Although Vattimo’s discussion stays very much within the realms of philosophy, the interesting thing, for some people, is that the general description of ‘weak thought’ fits closely with what contemporary art, in all its diverse and anarchic forms, should be, or ideally could be, were it not for the twin contagions of pretension and money (this might sound naïve, but just think about how art is actually used by most people). ‘Weak thought’ could therefore be easily contrived as a very useful model for the aspirations of artists today. Or, alternatively, what artists have been doing for the last few hundred years could be contrived as a model for ‘weak thought’.
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