The Principle of My Images

Dominic, of Poetix, recently asked where I came across a particular diagram of a mathematical category and what it was about. The truth of the matter is that I don’t have an answer to either question. I found that particular category beautiful upon doing a Google search and therefore included it in my post as I was writing. There are a number of ways in which the images I use on my blog are just as much what my blog is about than the written content. Often, after writing a post, I find myself more delighted by the images I paste into my posts than the post itself. As I am writing some random association will occur to me and I’ll do a Google image search to find what comes up. Sometimes these images are reflective of the content of my post. Sometimes the images are practical jokes or ironic commentary on myself. And at other times they are inside jokes and messages addressed to interlocutors that I love. But above all, were I to theorize my images– and therefore really betray what they’re about –I would say that they exemplify both the principle of assemblages and the Principle of Irreduction. In other words, the images I radomly find elicit a fundamental heterogeneity in my thought process, opening on to something that isn’t discursive or a matter of thought but which is nonetheless very much a commentary or supplement to what I’m writing. Often, I think, my posts cannot be properly thought or interpreted without thinking through these images as these images are every bit as much what I’m trying to think about as the discursive content of my posts themselves. But then again, that might just be a bullshit riff functioning as a fishing line.