Handbook For a Theory Hobby: The Hobby-Horse is the Sawhorse of Theory

Abstract

"Handbook for a Theory Hobby" is a montage of borrowed images and quotations and it functions as an amateur’s instruction manual for fun with theory. The manual plays through decaying models of thought beginning with a visual explanation of leaf rubbings. In this sense, it gives am impression of metaphors for thinking and memory. The manual is also a reading of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s chapter on rhizomatic thinking in A Thousand Plateaus. From that angle, the reader is asked to consider alternatives to alphabetic or book-centered thinking. The manual illustrates a potential botanical image which might replace the tree metaphor of dialectical thinking. By combining found fragments, this deceptively simple text explores how our culture represents thinking, memory, and learning.