Thinking as the rethinking of thoughts momentarily considered

Thinking as rethinking of thoughts momentarily considered

I have had time away from considering “colouredness”, to consider considering – interrogating thinking and the act of thought in fundamental process: thought that is a continual rethinking. At the recent, Fanon Fifty Years Later Colloquium at Rhodes University, Grant Farred’s paper used Heidegger as an entry point into the notion of thinking from the beginning. Considering the depths, and positing the project of thinking as fundamental inquiry that is a necessarily iterative process, Farred’s paper has stayed with us students as a challenge and a paradigm shift.

My time away from writing has led to many alterations in the first thoughts I momentarily considered: whether the declarative statements I made about the phenomena of “colouredness” or the fairly unthought ideas put down in haste – the thoughts that are not really thoughts, since they have not been subject to rethinking and critique from within. The ideas that I am beginning to formulate for my masters keep changing, in some instances minor shifts and in others theoretical quakes that requires a complete repositioning and again asks for rethinking.

For example, the Kuli Roberts debate – that has now been put to rest along with so many other necessary debates that suffer and all too early death in the graveyard of post-apartheid enquiry –represents something distinct from the ostensible questions of representation that it poses. It is easy to get caught up in the representation questions, but beyond the surface the greatest issue is that of the silencing of these debates: no matter how necessary. The post-apartheid project booms loudly over the constant debates that quickly quiet down to mutterings and whispers and then are quickly forgotten, only to be recalled when yet again we face the failure of addressing what it means to be in South Africa now. This is not a fresh, clean country that has wiped the slate of history – but one that comes to us carrying its baggage all too evidently. Again, Grant Farred astutely argues:

The concept of colouredness and its effects, the way in which it informs the thinking, political responses, the voting tendencies, the cultural particularities, the divided, bifurcated racial consciousness, of this South African constituency can only be understood if it is publically ‘debated’, ‘extended (in the sense that it is subjected to a demanding intellectual interrogation) and ‘quarrelled’ over and over again – Grant Farred, 2000: 8 -9

This intellectual interrogation is indeed demanding, requiring treading through minefields and murky waters and fundamentally insisting on thinking, and not the first thoughts that readily present themselves, masquerading as thinking. It is a critical project that is punctuated by inconsistencies and profound paradoxes, but most importantly, it is one of the most necessary enquiries in our post-apartheid context. To return then to this project, considering colouredness, is to start a thinking that will be arduous, demanding, slippery and complex – but that can indeed only be understood through fidelity to thinking: thinking as beginning again, thinking as the rethinking of thoughts momentarily considered.