Ideas Are Things
by Adam Robbert
Excerpt:
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.
I love the cosmogram/cryptogram polarity. This is brilliant writing.
Very sophisticated thinking. Joins materialism and idealism in situated ecologies.
Exactly! Intertwines ‘media materialism’ and constructivist epistemologies. I’m pretty into this! How to grab the whole text? Many thanks, Guilherme Kujawski
are ideas different than words/thoughts and if so what are they ?
@ about 30min Harman on Mcluhan:
The perennial question, dmf. I would want to say that ideas aren’t reducible to thoughts or words, but could be expressed through movement, sound, image etc. as well. I would also want to say that ideas can be exchange non-verbally between species (like Haraway and her dog). That doesn’t exactly tell us what ideas are, only that they are not exclusively words or thoughts.
sounds much like expressions which would suit my take on thinking of ideas not as something we have, or that have us, but rather as something we do (and have done to us), but than I don’t see how we can than consider them as actors/agents?
My position would be the reverse, then. If we can see that ideas are things we do, or have done to us (the implication being that ideas affect our constitution/perception), how could we not consider them as actors?
smiles, printed words, dance moves, photos, are they just mediums for “ideas” or do they have their own unique standing?
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