In response to a previous abbreviated version of comments I made in my last post Adam wrote:
I’m basically in agreement with everything you’re saying, and I apologize for not highlighting more clearly the points you make above (something I chalk up to the brevity of my little excerpt). Some quick points that will need to be developed elsewhere: I don’t mean ideas in the neoplatonic sense. Rather, I’m fully with you Michael when you write:To a certain extent I agree with Adam that ideologies (in the broadest sense of this term) ‘inform’ our thinking, or acts of thought, but what I want to avoid is the suggestion that ideas are somehow distinct or independent entities from the ongoing interplay (enaction) between animals and their artifacts (words, symbols, images). This might seem like a minor difference in emphasis, but I think we need to be very precise because it is exactly the issue of thinking in-between-ness that is important here. If, as I argue, ideation is primarily a non-local result of the living engagement of imaginative humans with nonhumans, as opposed to interactions with supposedly autonomous chunks of information, then we need to begin thinking differently about how individual subjectivity works in relation to, among other issues, political cognition.
“The projection of ideas are expressions and speech-acts (gesture) with consequences. That is, imaginal projections (ideas) only ever have potency/agency in the context of (and amplified by) specific elements with ecologies of written words, books, linguistic conventions, individual speech-acts of hominids, and cultural images.”But it’s precisely the mobility of ideas that strikes me here: they may always originate in human speech acts (or writings, compositions etc.) but it’s the recursivity of what Whitehead calls “modes of thought” that I am particularly interested in. Ideas are something that humans do, precisely as you describe, but I also want to argue that they are (in)formative of psyches and subjectivities beyond the initial act of doing, and that this activity constitutes an active ecology of ideas when placed within the context of communities of thinking-speaking-acting humans. [source]
For example, if ideas are dependent upon and enacted by living bodies relating to other entities then we must pay greater attention to the ecological-relational and material conditions within which our experiences and acts of thought are generated. Thinking the precise nature of the ‘in-between-ness’ or compositional character of ideation and embodied semiotics is a prerequisite for effectively tracking and then changing the conditions in which we exist together. That is to say eco-material 'infrastructure' as the immanent plane of consistency and relationality matters. Ideas are not actants/objects/agents but instead are the enacted phantasies of animals living in particular socio-material conditions.
Adam continiues:
We agree on some of these points very closely, but where I take off in a different direction from your assessment follows from your statement that:Again, I think the nuances here are important. Ideas are not artifacts unless they are actual images (symbols, photographs, etc) or texts (articles, books, poems, policy manuals) or devices. It is through our acts of thought and body that we generate objects/artifacts capable of triggering imaginal-emotional-neurological responses, but the power and potency of such artifacts are not a feature of some intrinsic and autonomous properties or capacity of ideas as such, but rather a function of their entanglement and distributed activation within meshes of biological memory and social convention. Ideas, then, do not form or inform their own ecologies but are part of a more general integrated material-energetic and imaginal ecology of things. And figuring out the distributed, non-local dynamics of such enactive contexts allows humans to begin behaving, manipulating and adapting in more creative ways.
“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.”I think by acknowledging the presence of ideas as real artifacts in the constitution of experience, I’m honoring complexity not detracting from it. Further, by pointing to the thing-liness of the idea I am precisely calling out the ways in which ideas are deeply embedded in situated processes of human-matter-media perception, and my aim is to explore in an experimental/ecological way the manners in which specific modes of thinking carve out the always-more complex world in which we live and act. The crux for me is that it matters what kinds of ideas and concepts we use to think about and act within the world; the idea is an ecological event with ecological consequences that must be understood as an actor if subjectivity is to be adequately theorized from an ecological perspective. [source]
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Hi Michael,
I posted the following in response to a question about the objecthood of ideas from dmf on one of my posts:
"Regarding ideas as objects (or not) there is an interesting discussion unfolding (or about to) between Adam (Knowledge Ecology) and Michael (Archive Fire) regarding this topic [...] and I am also trying to pull my thoughts together on this. In a nutshell, however, I think we need to get at some kind of ontography of the ‘idea’ (i.e. is there such a thing as ‘an idea’ and, if so, can we approach it as an ethologist or an ecologist?), and I think this will show us that ideas enter into assemblages, circulate through them and, as they circulate, that different ideas create different sets of opportunities and constraints in the particular assemblages they circulate in. Following DeLanda, ideas might be seen as entities that participate in processes of de/coding and de/territorialisation within assemblages: why deny them that function or agency? Simply because they are contingent on humans and their practices (like factishes, for example)? Either way, I think that ideas rely on what we might (more conventionally) consider as objects (texts, etc.) for their circulations, alongside other objects like conversations, movies, objets d’art and so on. I do not think this in any way suggests that works of art can be reduced to the ideas that they help to circulate, nor that the circulation of the ideas can be reduced to specific classes of ‘communicative’ or ‘expressive’ objects. After all, photons and electrons are as much part of how we communicate as are families, corporations and governments and so on… Assemblages and the countless actors who compose them and meticulously give them their enduring quality, play very fundamental roles in both the circulation of ideas and the objects that these ideas ride upon. Nothing gets reduced to anything else in this framework and everything retains its contingent autonomy. Of course, I’m not really sure about all this, but it’s what I’m trying to unpick."
I am with you that we can't think of ideas as belonging to a separate ecology from the assemblages of humans and non-humans that serve as their very conditions of existence.
On another note, have come across the work of Ralph Stacey (I got into his work while inquiring into theories of complexity, power and learning in organisational change processes)? He treats ideology (following Bhaktin and Elias) as: “a form of conversation that preserves the current order by making it seem natural and in this way, just like all other conversation, it organises the experience and behaviour of the group” and “as a mutually constructed conversation that is continually repeated, not a 'thing' that is shared or stored. The ideology exists only in the speaking of it.” Stacey's work, though it expanded to include the human body and affect, neglected non-human entities from its theorisation of organisations (whose reification he repeatedly bashes), treating them as patterns of 'complex responsive processes of communicative interaction'.
Obviously, neither ideology nor ideas can be reduced to (or are equivalent to) some kind of material artefact. But ontography asks us to be more exacting than this, to trace out just what ideology is, where it lurks, what it's dependencies or conditions of existence are, how it functions and develops, how it influences various forms of reciprocal capture between entities (human and non-human) in specific assemblages.
I am still, however, troubled by the question 'what is an idea?'. Is it a 'thought-image', a hypothesis, a truth claim, a phantasy, an epiphenomena, an abstraction/concept, a proposition - or potentially all of the above? What is the difference between the idea of, say, 'the Nation' and the idea that it would be nice to go for a walk today... or the idea that reality is contingent and could be other and so on... Maybe ideas are a kind of wager with reality...
Just some quick thoughts - so apologies if not very coherent.
very good, perhaps we need to put an x thru Ideas like we have (after TMorton) thru Nature and talk instead about particular bodies/objects/interactions/mangles.
More specificity/thickness and less abstraction/generalization/misplaced-concreteness/reification.
More emphasis on act-ions/event-ualities/interventions/collaging/aspect-dawnings...
Ever onward!
-dmf
Reading this, I had this sense of the way ideas move relatively easily, though not without translation, from one medium to the next. For example, the idea of "sustainability" moves from the book on my shelf to my mind and then into a text that I write on my blog, and from there to the minds of my (small) readership. That's the image I get from you, Michael, when you talk about the "non-local in-betweeness" of ideation, though I know it runs counter to what you're saying in some ways. In particular, talking about ideas traveling between media makes it sound as if ideas are objects or things that move and affect the media upon which they are inscribed. Nevertheless, if we talk about objects as emergent phenomena - emerging from the relationships between other objects - then why should not ideas - emerging from the relationships between sentient objects and material-semiotic objects - be counted as objects? Certainly different from the sentient object and the material-semiotic object from which they emerged, and dependent upon them to some extent, but isn't this why Harman classes ideas as "sensual objects"?
I wonder too what this discourse would be like if the words "object" and "thing" were removed completely. Would that make it easier to find agreement, as I think part of this debate is over a difference about what constitutes a "thing" rather than the specific nature of ideas. Or would that perhaps bias the conversation too much towards Michael's position?
I don't know - I'm just thinking this through with you guys. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts. This bears directly, I think, on some issues that I've been trying to make sense of with regard to the nature and role of epistemology.
http://newbooksinscitechsoc.com/2012/09/19/denise-phillips-acolytes-of-nature-defining-natural-science-in-germany-1770-1850-university-of-chicago-press-2012/
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/09/ian-hacking-the-anthropology-and-archaeology-of-numbers/
Hey Andre,
Wow, I really need to make it over to your blog more often. So much good stuff there – and there are lot of issues you and I agree upon. I’ve just been ridiculously busy training for competition in Muay Thai and MMA these days (5 days a week, 3 hours a day) that I hardly turn on the CPU when I get home. My last fight ever is November 10, 2012, so I’m hoping to increase my blogging presence and participate more in all these interesting discussions after that. I have wanted to address several of your posts in particular.
In regards to your comments: in general I agree with you. But, again, I want to totally reject the notion that ‘ideas’ are objects in-themselves. For example, if I conjure up the thought of a big blue boat and linger with this thought for a moment, am I now obliged to consider that conjured boat as an autonomous entity? I don’t think so. Instead, what is happening is my body is generating a virtual impression/experience of boatness and blueness which I then elaborate upon imaginatively through intentions and further imaginal associations through an ongoing process of phantasy. At no point is there an actual substance/object we can call a blue boat. There is, however, an assemblage (or ‘mangle’) of physical, neural, environmental – that is to say ecological – materials and potencies which exist together in such a way that affords such imaginative events, or acts of thought. So ‘ideas’ don’t “circulate”; but artifacts, images and conversations do – triggering all kinds of affective responses and behaviors (including other acts of thought).
The issue for me, then, is to try to think more precisely the dynamics of actuality and possibility unfolding between things. And realizing how ‘ideas’ are afforded, generated and perpetuated phantasies has helped me better understand the role all those other actual objects play in particular social assemblages.
I like your response above though and think, perhaps, I should tie your comments and this response into a post of its own…
dmf, exactly what I was thinking...
Hey Jeremy,
Yeah, I like the notion of the fluidity of ideation, but I reject the notion that ideas circulate. I think this is a view attached to a very out of date ontology. For example, a notion like sustainability doesn’t “move” from the book to your mind to your blog, but instead you, as a living experiencing body, might interact with a book and its text in such a way that activates prior learning to catalyze some thoughts about sustainability which you then express, or act out through a computer and create a blog post. Nothing moved except bodies and brains and hardware. Yet there was a catalytic chain of interactions and activations between potent entities and coded materials that lead to certain expressions.
For me ontography is about trying to understand what actually exists and how things work. And here I’m trying to really understand, as you point out, the "non-local in-betweeness" of ecologically generated embodied imagination/phantasy. Giving up on ‘ideas’ as objects helps us understand what Wittgenstein and Derrida and Rorty (and the Buddha and Lao Tsu among others) wanted to teach us, in the sense that conceptuality – and by extension all knowledge - is intrinsically undecidable, unstable and ephemeral. And this insight has some very serious political, existential and philosophical implications.
So what is ‘ideology’ from this perspective? I’m still working that out…
As for our terms of reference, I think the issue is exactly about what constitutes an object. Thinking about whether ‘ideas’ are objects or not is a perfect case study to try and hammer out a conception of the nature of object-ness in my opinion. It is also a discussion that requires we suspend our faith on language to the extent that begin looking at our actual experiences of the world. I believe a radical phenomenology of ideation dissolves any theoretic grounds for the position that autonomous entities can be generated primarily at the level of imaginal operation.
Hi Everyone,
Michael--thank you so much for initiating this discussion; there is much to talk about here.
I have read through both posts and am finding myself excited with the level of nuance we are getting into.
It may take me a few days to sit down and write a response--and I really want to take the time to do it properly rather than give you a few all-too-brief sound bites now.
I have some free time coming up this week that will give me the time I need to write something up. Till then--cheers and thanks for the interesting discussion!
Looking forward to it Adam.
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