Recently I had the pleasure of discovering the Institute for Social Inventions' Global Ideas Bank site and to read some of ideas, mostly in the Spirituality section. I am amazed at the amount of the work done and at the quality and the quantity of the collected ideas. What I liked most of all is that the majority of proposals contain indeed a new idea, an elusive intellectual entity or 'monad' that is so difficult to extract from most scholarly publications.
My enterprise for Internet entitled The Intelnet is devoted to the discussion and promotion of inter-disciplinary ideas in the humanities and is in its earliest stage, but will contain a Bank of New Ideas.
There are already several ideas deposited in the Bank in its pre-electronic form, from 1986 in Moscow; and it is much more modest than your Global Ideas Bank as regards possible social impact. Perhaps, the difference in our profiles can be summarised in this way: the 'imaginative non-technological ideas and projects' (which you mention) that I also would like to collect in our Bank of New Ideas, are not specifically designed, in my case, to 'improve the quality of life', that is, are presumably devoid of any practical value and social consequences.
My interests are more in 'improving the quality of thinking' and enhancing the boundaries of the 'thinkable', especially as concerns theoretical (metaphysical, theological, critical, etc) imagination. My project deals more with 'the humanities', than with the life of humanity as a whole, and especially with the trans-disciplinary aspects of the humanities.
Certainly, there are many overlappings between our projects, and I would be happy to co-operate with your Institute in any possible way. Perhaps, some of your more theoretically oriented authors would like to deposit some of their hypotheses or imaginative theories into our Bank of New Ideas?
On my side, I would be glad to submit to your depository some of my ideas that have more practical value, for example, the very idea of this Intelnet, now underway.
Here are several suggested areas for paradigmatic thinking:
- New cognitive concepts and research methods in the humanities
- New disciplines (for example, I am going to suggest 'silentology')
- New artistic and literary movements
- New styles of behaviour
- New spiritual practices and cults
- New comprehensive philosophical systems and principles
- Metaphysics of everyday life
There will also be a branch called ThinkLinks, designed to establish intellectual links between remote and seemingly unrelated spheres of knowledge. And another branch called Intelnetics which will focus on different perspectives on universal knowledge, considering, for instance:
- The contemporary status of disciplines claiming universality (philosophy, theology, semiotics, etc)
- The possibility of a universal discipline in humanities
- Intelnetics as a metadiscipline.
Every author of a new idea or a thinklink will be invited to become a member of Intelnet's inter-disciplinary council and to provide us with his/her home page.
After graduation with a diploma in the theory of literature and Russian philology, my membership in the Union of Writers allowed me to spend most of my life at home, just reading and writing about whatever happened to interest me.
The so-called era of stagnation during the seventies and early eighties was politically miserable and dull, although it provided us with the opportunity to concentrate on metaphysical matters which were not subject to the changing political fashions. In my view, this period of 'timelessness' was nothing but a crude imitation of eternity. Some members of my so-called 'missing' generation felt themselves to be as close to eternity as the greatest visionaries of the Middle Ages. Other contemporaries tried to parody the official culture while ridiculing the present, the past, and the future. I tried to argue that paradise and parody are two complementary modes of feeling that are both necessary for survival in a Soviet utopia.
All that had been underground in the seventies gradually surfaced during the eighties. I had the opportunity to publish some of my books and to found several societies that united people of various professions who were interested in interdisciplinary cultural studies. The first was the Club of Essayists (Moscow 1982-87), the second was the 'Image and Thought' association and the third was the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture in Moscow's Experimental Creative Centre. All of these groups tried to close the gaps between different social, national, and disciplinary spheres of culture and to create a transcultural type of consciousness. Our argument was: if culture helps to liberate one from the prison of nature, what force can liberate a person from the prison of culture itself? We invented types of meditation which allowed one to set oneself free from our native culture without resorting to counter-cultural escapades or primitive barbarism.
Thus the idea of Intelnet, an inter-disciplinary community of creative minds, though in essence as old as the world, or at least as Plato's Academia, comes from my experience in the Moscow intellectual milieu of the 1980s. I shared this experience of what we called 'co-thinking' (Russian somyslie) with such wonderful friends and colleagues, almost all of whom still live in Moscow.
Together we tried to create integrated, 'polyphonic' descriptions of certain cultural phenomena and to work out patterns of 'translation' for different professional languages. Our activities drew an intellectual audience, in particular university students, into the process of collective intellectual creativity and writing. We conducted about 70 sessions on such various topics as dreams, birthdays, silence, limits of reason, city and village, punctuation marks - investigating these topics from multi-disciplinary points of view (physics of dreams, lingustics of dreams, sociology of dreams, etc). The materials of all these collective improvisations (they were always written since there was a period of silence and meditation within any discussion) are kept in my archive.
I continue to investigate Russia's modern intellectual history and am at work on little explored territory: non-Marxist thought in Russia for the last forty years. I am writing a monograph on such principal trends in recent Russian thought as cosmism, culturology, personalism, conceptualism and several varieties of religious philosophy.
Our intellectual community, as I see it now, was a sort of pre-electronic Intelnet, and that is why I am so happy now to start the 'real' Intelnet in its much more mature, global form. I hope that what can make Intelnet special among the many intellectual sites on Internet is the direct exposition of creative ideas. It is not like a conference or a newsgroup where discussion is led by small and sometimes inconsistent impulses of opinions, remarks and objections. It is not like a professional journal dealing in a highly specialised language with some specific problems. What is crucial to Intelnet is a specific genre of 'a new idea', so suited to the receptiveness and responsiveness of contemporary electronic networks.
Mikhail N. Epstein (Epshtein), Associate Professor, Department of Russian Studies, 403 Candler Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 (tel. 727-2594; e-mail: <russmne@unix.cc.emory.edu>). His book After the Future can be ordered from Massachusetts University Press, Box 429, Amherst, MA 01004 (tel 413-545-2219).
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