What does it mean to say of an assemblage that it thinks, or of its acts and dispositions, its material inscriptions and configurations, that they constitute a thought? Readers of Douglas Hofstadter’s G?del, Escher, Bach will be familiar with the notion that an ant colony can be supposed to think, that its thoughts may take the form of streams of ants setting down new trails of pheremones or following existing ones, and that the consciousness of the colony is not a telepathic unity, a gathering together of many tiny ant consciousnesses, but a property that the colony only possesses at a certain level of organisation: it is conscious, but its constituent elements are not. What it thinks is a weaving together of the assemblage and its environment: not an encapsulated mental content, but the organisation by the colony’s activity of a mass of twigs, leaves, chemicals, live ants, dead ants, affordances and obstructions into a pattern with its own endogenous stability and dynamism. A thought in this sense is a material, perishable thing - a sufficient quantity of boiling water could entirely efface it - but it is also “immortal” inasmuch as it persists beyond the vital horizon of individual ants. Death is nothing to it (although extinction is another matter).

I suggested a while back that the dialectic of thematic variation and axiomatic invariance in the Viz strip “Fru T. Bunn” approached “the consistency of a thought”, and although it was partly meant as a sort of hyperbolic comic flourish I think this suggestion did have a certain validity. “A thought” is indeed that kind of thing, and to say that “love is a thought” is to say that it proposes and propagates itself as a distinct form with its own way of insisting within and against the world. When Blake declares that he must create his own system or be enslaved by another man’s, he is simultaneously trying on a bit of bravado about creative personal originality and recognising that it is at the level of systems, not inspirations, that the difference between “Blake” and “Swedenborg” will have to realize itself. A thought is something that systematically differentiates itself from what it doesn’t think, remaining in tension with an un-thought; love makes a world that is not the world in which each of the lovers separately existed, a world that cannot be made by adding their separate worlds together.

Where assemblages involving human beings are concerned, it is of course not correct to say that the assemblage thinks but its constituent elements do not. People think. We’re not ants, and the purpose of this kind of talk is not to make people appear ant-like (and indifferently squishable). However, there is a specific sense in which we “do not think” what we, collectively, think; in which the thought of the assemblage is not the thought of an individual or the sum of a collection of individual thought processes. It is a question of cognitive mapping, of the resources available within my language, or yours, for identifying and separating the parts of the thought we compose together. There is no question of not attempting such a mapping, of behaving as if one were a dumb particle being shunted around by vast impersonal forces beyond human understanding, although that conceit can be fun to entertain sometimes. But no such mapping can ever be total: if love “is a thought”, there is no thinking of either of the lovers that can take complete cognition of it.