Stoned thinking could be situated in a nexus of contemporary discourses, including ecotheory, object oriented ontology, new materialisms, and environmental humanities more generally. Stoned thinking aligns well with Jane Bennett's call in Vibrant Matter to “theorize a kind of geological affect or material vitality” in recognition of the “shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter” (61). Of all the many works of eco-theory, stoned thinking finds its closest companion in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, in which he both theorizes and enacts "an affective interspace where the agency of stone and human ardor meet in mutual relation, in cross-ontological embrace" (252).

Stoned thinking follows new materialisms to their logical conclusion by embracing an animaterialism. The animating faculty of this mental modality is the “animaterialist imagination,” a portmanteau Pierre Jardin coined after the work of Gaston Bachelard. Jardin takes inspiration from Bachelard's disciplined commitment to living poetically and "dreaming well." This ethos nurtures a "material imagination," a mode of immersive, intimate interaction with matter. The "material imagination" "goes beyond the attractions of the imagination of forms; [it] thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary” (xlvi). Bachelard stipulates that “a kind of dialectical animism” between matter and mind is required to set this imaginative work in motion. This animist dimension of animaterialist imagination exceeds the discourse of “animating” that is ubiquitous in contemporary new materialisms. The animaterialist imagination is attuned to Cohen’s assertion that, “Stone is animated and self-organizing. It speaks, when we stop insisting that communication requires words rather than participating in meaning's generation" (192).