Acts of Thought - Part 1: Ideation as Distributed Activity

The following comments were provoked by an email from a very resourceful friend regarding a recent series of excerpts (here and here) by Adam at Knowledge Ecology. And please bear with me here as I'm struggling to articulate much of what I want to express on these issues.

First let me say, without a doubt, Adam and I hold some very similar positions on what we interpret as the processual, evolving and ecological nature of things. And, as I have stated in the past, I don’t think I have ever met someone as young as Adam who has such a rare combination of intelligence, compassion and character. I follow his blog religiously and I will track his progress and academic work well into the future.

However Adam and I also hold some strongly conflicting views (specifically about panexperientialism, object-oriented philosophy, materialism and Whitehead) - which is fine as far as it goes, because I don’t presume to have definitive knowledge about all the issues, or even be completely on target about what I think I know. I am often more interested in exploring the issues on which I disagree with someone than when I agree with them - if only because I find it more productive to consider what they know that I may have missed and/or if my beliefs are self-consistent enough to withstand scrutiny from opposing views. In short, I learn more from discussions with those I disagree with than the opposite. Adam just happens to be one of those thinkers who I find a lot of common ground with but who also challenges me to rethink my position on major topics. And so the following comments are meant in the spirit of mutual exploration and inquiry.

Adam writes:

Knowledge ecologies have important implications for how we think about ideas. In the world of human knowledge, the idea acts as a cosmogram; an actor that is part of its surrounding terrain, an abstraction that is part of the territory it describes, exerting a pull on the world it tries to map. Ideas are things that, once generated by the thinker, immediately gain their own autonomy and ability to re-arrange other ideas. Plainly stated, ideas exist in the world in the same way as any other ecological actor; ideas are a part of the actuality of experience and are therefore amenable to an ecological interpretation. When mediated through the appropriate media ecologies, ideas can then impact the physical form of any other entity within their reach. As an abstraction, the idea is also a cryptogram, concealing certain features of the terrain it helps to enact. The contrast between the revealing and concealing character of the idea speaks to the fact that no single mode of thought has a monopoly on the real; rather, every idea is partial and relative to its ecology, capable only of exposing certain features of a more complex landscape. In this way knowledge ecology has a complex relationship to media ecology since both are actively foregrounding and backgrounding different aspects of a more complex reality. [source]

I’m not at all comfortable with the notion that ideas are objects. Ideas seem to me more like something actors do, as expressions of objects, than things or actors as such. Of course it all depends on what we are willing to call an object. The first question that I would ask someone who believes ideas to be objects is where exactly is an idea? What place do ideas occupy in space-time? What are their components? For something to be a thing I believe it has to have location, 'simple' or otherwise.

Alternatively, I believe ideas are enacted and associative images (cf. imagination, imaginal) instantiated and projected by bodies/brains viz. the deployment of pubic languages/symbolics. As Wittgenstein argued, there are no "private languages". The linguistic tokens (signifiers) we use to perform our thought-acts and speech-acts are embedded in conventional and historical (cultural) systems and we necessarily derive our conceptual content from this reservoir of semantic resources and normative associations. Therefore ideas are actually private imaginings and recombinations of public (social) referents. Such private imaginings are fleeting and ephemeral products without substantial properties of their own, and only ever arising from and instantiated by specific assemblages of bodies, brains, codes, concepts, memories, habits and communications. Ideas are not objects, anymore than digestion or emotions are. Ideation is something animals do.
 
Now one might be tempted to label me an eliminativist in this regard (which is fine as far as that goes), but I certainly don’t believe our ideas and beliefs are without bearing on the world, nor do I deny that our imaginations extend the strictly physical capacities of the human body. I think humans, and most animals, have complex phenomenological lives (qualia) that cannot be reduced via appeals to the activity of the brain alone. To explain precisely why I suggest that the qualitative, imaginal aspects of experience are irreducible, and exactly how imagination emerges from matter to be an extension of material is a massive endeavor not possible here. However, an ultra-brief, somewhat fuzzy sketch might run something like this:

Human’s love their phantasies. Endowed with big brains and socially evolved circuitous libidos, language-use evolved and emerged from more primitive capacities for gestural expression and communication. Proto-humans slowly added grunts and tonal sounds to our strictly physical, non-verbal gestures and expressions over a long period of time. Eventually those grunts (acoustic gestures) and manners of communicating became habituated and socially recognized norms of reference (with variable affective triggers and resonations), which in turn allowed collective reference to become collective memories and systems of tokened conventional signification ('culture'). Such social and habitual referencing and communicating forms what Geertz, following Max Weber, referred to as “webs of signification”.

At some point during this evolution of signification metaphor and image began to afford useful (adaptive) enough abstraction that 1) our brain's configuration fundamentally changed such that 2) our experience the world was drastically altered. Our ancestors started to generate elaborate mental associations and imaginal projections and combinations, which in turn gave rise to increasingly bulky narratives, mythologies, ideologies, cave paintings and whole sets of transmissible artifacts of thought (e.g., hieroglyph, writing, etc.). That is, our mental projections/phantasies can and often do become static or captivated or fermented as artifacts through the fashioning of explicit images, symbols, writing, and other physical representations. It is these dead representations, these tokens of phantasy (of which ‘fantasy’ in the pejorative sense is only a sub-species), that become the objects of our consideration. These artifacts, paintings, books, films, and objects are fully ecological, agentic assemblages, and part of the wider materiality and relationality of things - and so become part of the distributed network of sensitivities from which we draw our experience.

With this advance in conceptuality we started a great love affair with our own thoughts and phantasies, which culminated in all sorts of folk-ontologies and collective imaginings that objectified thought as 'thing'. These personal and collective conceptions/stories we tell each other about how the non-conceptual, nonhuman world works become orthodoxies of arrogance, unrecognizable as the secondary tokens of imagination that they truly are. This is also how we began to mistake our conceptions for our perceptions.

What is important in my story of the rise of conceptuality here is that ideation, as phantasy or imagination, is an emergent capacity for gestural expression, not to be identified or equated with the symbolic tokens and actifacts that are produced by such capacities. The activity of thought is an imaginal act: something we do and engage in. Acts of thought are elaborations of the primitive gestures of embodied animal relations embedded in extensive networks of brain/body, environmental and interpersonal processes. So in no sense is an ‘idea’ a fully autonomous (withdrawn) object within this network. Ideas, like the languages they emerge from, cannot be things in their own right because they require and only ever  exist within wider assemblages of sociality and biology. Ecologies of signification and imagination cannot be differentiated from the social and material context in which they exist. What Adam calls 'knowledge ecologies', then, are inseparable from those aspects of the more general and distributed ecology of matter, energy and expression.

Adam writes:

While knowledge ecologies are not exclusive to humans, it is in the context of the human that we find the explosion of many new knowledge ecologies (e.g., worldviews, paradigms, ideologies, myths, and other subtle ecosystems) exerting their own gravitational pull upon other actualities of experience. To be sure, an idea may not have the physical substantiality of a hammer or submarine, but it would be difficult to argue that ideas don’t impact the material conditions of the entities around them. In many cases it is an idea (neoliberal economics, for example) that is the decisive factor in generating relations between humans and nonhumans. A study of knowledge ecologies would thus include the role ideas, worldviews, paradigms, or ideologies play in co-shaping human and more-than-human worlds. [source]

So what are ideas if not actual substances? Are they Platonic forms? If, as I argue above, ideas are individual and collective associative-projections deploying pubic concepts and embedded within complex configurations of materiality, media and social relation, then it is not ideas which "impact the material conditions of the entities around them", but the specific acts of thought and communication (expressions) of particular material entities. Which is to say, imagining-bodies act and communicate and express in ways that affect, resonate with, coordinate or conflict with other entities and ecological systems. Ideas do not have agency or thing-power imagining bodies do. And if we want to study the power of group thinking and discourse then we must investigate what imaginative bodies actually do and say; we have to understand human expressions and acts of thought in the contexts they occur.

As Cowley states:

While many take language to be 'real', I regard this as misleading. Instead, it is traced to a meshwork of dynamical processes, imagination and how we use heterogeneous artefacts. Language, like mind, is a social product. Thus, as children, we come to take a language stance. Rejecting the tradition of idealizing language away from behaviour, I distinguish the dynamics of human dialogue from the second-order cultural constructs (words and meanings) emphasized in structuralist traditions. Language, on this view, is triply grounded: it connects embrained bodies, cultural processes and first-person phenomenology. [source]

In some sense, maybe, ideas could be better understood as hyperobjects – massively distributed in time-space and only locally manifested in partial ways. But even if this is the case I would still argue that ideas and ideologies (as larger sets of ideas) are still only aspects of a wider, integrated and more complex ecology, and not ecologies in their own right. Ideas are always already implicated in more general regimes of attraction.

But perhaps it’s a problem of vocabulary? A problem of misplaced nouns? I agree with Adam that ideas do have impact in the world, but, again, they do so not as 'objects', but through the expressions or actions of real material entities and their artifacts (e.g., as written symbols, books, blueprints, policy manuals, laws, etc.). The projection of ideas as expressions and speech-acts (gestures) certainly have consequence. But ideation (as acts of thought) is an embodied, enacted and ecologically implicated activity, not to be confused with the artifacts of its process.

We are animals coping in the world with practical communication and social gestures embedded within modes of existence which have their own historically evolved language-games. And by reifying our acts of thought as “things” we reduce the complexity involved and needlessly obfuscate what is essentially a distributed body-brain-culture-community event.