Unpacking ideas in a chaotic world
Have you ever thought about what ideas you use to think of other ideas with? For example, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor, is an idea that has been used to think of other ideas with. Darwinian evolution is a method of explaining changes. His ideas dismantled the notion that humans were miraculously special. Over time, there was room for variation that transformed the beliefs people had about themselves.
For Darwin, the idea of variation existed in random mutations that produced adaptive changes to form new life - a concept of natural selection for environmental adaptation. But the ‘mutation’ from his discipline was the beginning of something new in society, without losing any of its original quality; the new ideas people had about themselves as a species. That’s why it is relevant which stories tell stories, which concepts think other concepts or which systems systemise systems. They can lead to meaningful insights. This approach can be used to cross disciplinary boundaries to develop new ways of thinking.
These thoughts have stemmed from a book I’ve been reading, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway. She is a feminist scholar in science and technology. Her book tries to present a reconfiguration of our relationship with Earth and all of its inhabitants. What resonates with me is her philosophy of our currently accepted Anthropocene epoch in which the human and non-human are inextricably linked - a world that requires sympoiesis (a term coined by Haraway as collective creation or co-creation), building on a more liveable and sustainable future.
Stories lead to other stories
Lately, I’ve been having conversations with colleagues regarding what ideas have shaped our thoughts on art. What is art anymore? Early painters, for instance, had no sense of depth, but, over time, they developed mechanisms to create three-dimensional space. Some techniques dominated over others. Some aesthetic characteristics flourished. This historical period in art illustrates a Darwinian process of natural selection. Today, a certain history of Western art has come to an end. According to art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto, we are at the beginning of the modern era of art where ‘anything goes’. He claimed that people are essentially a system of representations. Meaning, we are the products of our interactions with the world, so we are systems that generate representations of our histories. In the art world, artists have built on accepted art theories and on a history of ideas that came before. Over time, artists have become capable of representing more complex ideas about what art can be. This connects to Haraway’s use of ideas to think other ideas with.
Ideas lead to other ideas
An idea of art can be much more powerful than the art itself. Or perhaps that is the point. Artist Teresa Margolles exhibited a performance art piece in Venice a few years ago. During La Biennale di Venezia, at a specific time every afternoon, someone would clean the marble floors of pavilions and piazzas with a mop and bucket. But the mop would smear the marble floors with red-brown stains, leaving blood-like smudges behind. Word spread around Venice that the mop had been dipped in the blood of murdered victims during the drug wars in Mexico. Whether the blood-soaked mop had actually absorbed the victims' blood on sites of drug abuse, poverty and violence was not the point; the interpretation was. Once people heard the story, they were compelled to search for her artwork. The relaying of the story played an important role, which was just as powerful as the art itself. All that remains now is the oral history.
Margolles transcribed her ideas from Mexican places to Italian spaces, a transformed reality made available to an international audience. If the public didn’t hear about the story behind her artwork, it might have been overlooked. Her history was told through her system of representations, revealing her view of the world at that time. You didn’t need to be there to visualise her art-in-action interpretation. Even now, you can use your imagination. I consider Margolles’ art an example of a ‘mutation’ to cope with her cultural environment; a political art narrative incorporated into a new cultural adaptation, comparable to Darwin’s idea of variation. Margolles’ artwork represents a type of mutation that is not random but a series of adaptive changes that take on new life with new qualities in a different sphere.
Concepts conceptualise other concepts
I connect Margolles’ example as commentary on Arthur Danto’s ideology that anything goes in art, but what of the spatial environment in which cultural adaptation takes place? Are natural and built environments reimagined in the same way as postmodern art, or are they inseparable? We seldom find ‘natural’ environments on Earth, as we are so enmeshed in the Anthropocene. We have profoundly impacted our lands, oceans, wildlife and atmosphere to such a degree that natural and built environments are almost indistinguishable. However, through the eyes of archaeology we can recognise that different landscapes facilitate different activities in the immediate and broader environment, shaping our towns and cities. Pre-existing settlements have helped shape future settlements in a particular environment, influencing social and economic processes. In turn, certain environments generate certain types of behaviours.
We understand our surroundings in predictable ways by forming mental maps of places. During the 60s, urban planner Kevin Lynch developed a theoretical model in his book, The Image of the City. Archaeologists have used his theoretical model to research historical cities like Rome. Lynch used five concepts as his basis for analysing movement in cities – pathways, nodes, landmarks, junctions and edges. According to Lynch, people trust the main thoroughfares of cities. These main paths also work as edges, defining urban regions and highlighting the concept of districts. The roles of paths and junctions can be seen as facilitating flow towards landmarks such as monuments, parks and churches. Nodes along paths, which can be represented as landmarks, can have heightened social activity surrounding them. The paths and edges can be used to define the local identity of neighbourhoods and inhabitants. Under Lynch’s model, way-finding appears to be intuitive. The pathways, nodes, landmarks, junctions and edges are intentional entities that can be interpreted as a process of Darwinian evolution for navigating layers of information. Lynch’s concepts present human behaviour in an engaging way, leaving me with one question: how much of the historical layers are integrated with the urban development of cities today?
Past systems systemise present systems
If we think about public spaces, often designed to attract large groups of people, we should consider how we navigate them. In Italy, a piazza retains its definition as an open public space, surrounded by public buildings like cafes and churches. It is an active node, connecting pathways. It is defined by its historical heritage as a pedestrian-oriented destination, designed to be the heart of a neighbourhood or town. In the Netherlands there are pleins, but their purpose does not readily translate to that of a town square or Italian piazza. Dutch pleins are public squares, but they are not necessarily the centre of public life. I use the language of Italian piazzas to preserve an idea about the continuity of the past because without sustained remembrance, we can become lost. Something is lost when the spatial history of a place is not included as a system of ideas in spatial planning. If we do not build on the historical sentiment of a space, what we are left with are buried stories. And it will be the job of future archaeologists to reveal the jagged pieces. As humans living on Earth for a finite amount of time, stories are all we have, so it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with. Places such as pleins, town squares and piazzas are systems of representations of cultural-historical spatial contexts. The possibilities of what we can create, be it through life-as-art performance or planned urban development for environmental sustainability, is what I find so fascinating.
Consequentialism in a chaotic world
Haraway encourages us to co-create in the Chthulucene where we, as kin, are already intertwined. If an idea is used to think other ideas with, through the Darwinian concept of adaptation and natural selection, new ideas can be birthed. This is demonstrated in Danto’s system of representations, where we change our world to fit our representations and change our representations to fit the world, where anything goes, as is demonstrated in Margolles’ postmodern art. Margolles’ ideas transcend the temporal experience in a public space through oral history, to which Lynch provides a model to develop our ideas about our surroundings, which can be applied in any city, leaving an impression of a map in our minds. Perhaps we become more conscious in the world knowing that we are intricately woven into our environment; our environment is essentially us.
Re-imagine ideas as mental, bloodied piazzas. They are nodes; main conduits leading to pathways that are not yet but might be. Our ideas are a system of representations. What we represent is an accumulation of our histories. It matters what concepts we think other concepts with. By building pathways, landmarks and junctions, we build networks; physically in the world and within our own psyche. These webs are a conglomeration of habitable networks that can form sustainable alliances. If we think of this as a representation of both living and non-living components, functioning as a single system, then this conceptual framework could be regarded as a single organism. So it matters which ideas of systems represent systemised ideas of systems. We can build on our systems of representations, and our histories, for a sustainable future.
The way we perceive our environment is the way in which we shape it. By examining ideas from different disciplines and traversing boundaries, we can attempt to cross-pollinate ideas. We should encourage these mutations to spread for mutual enrichment, to continue the transformation of ideas we have, about ourselves and our environment, without losing any of our original quality.
We just have to stretch our imagination.