How concepts get their meaning

In his recent essay titled Che cos’è un dispositivo? (What Is a Dispositif?), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlines the genealogy of the concept ‘dispositif‘, tracing it to Hegel and other precursors. I was perplexed.

One possible origin of the term lies in genetics, where information – encoded in DNA – is transmitted from one generation to the next. Replication is largely faithful, though subject to occasional transcription errors. Agamben, without defining ‘dispositif’, briefly notes that Plato never defined his own central term: ‘idea’. Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that all of Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato.

How can one annotate faithfully and copiously an undefined concept?

The analogy suggests that information is granular and can be replicated – though imperfectly. Words, whether spoken or written, are symbols that convey only fragments of the original thought. Rather than functioning as templates for accurate transmission, they act more like shadows or ruins. The telephone game offers a familiar example.

The analogy also implies one-to-one transmission. But unlike genes, cultural ideas do not pass cleanly or predictably from one mind to another. There is no fixed path or stable structure. Instead, they mutate, blend, or vanish. More often, ideas spread one-to-many (see How Darwinian is cultural evolution? by Nicolas Claidière, Thomas C. Scott-Phillips, and Dan Sperber). They may go viral – or disappear without a trace. We do not observe the slow, incremental shifts that characterise changes in gene frequency under Darwinian evolution.

Genetic descent involves, at most, the mixing of two sets of genes. Cultural transmission has no such limit. It draws on multiple sources, often simultaneously, and much of what is conveyed happens collaterally or incidentally, for reasons unrelated to any original intention. In culture, association often matters more than meaning.

In genetics, the offspring passively inherits from its parents. In culture, reception is active. What matters is not just what one receives, but what one does with it – whether reshaping it, repurposing it, or rejecting it altogether. Ideas and culture are plastic, not granular.

Another possible origin of the term lies in cultural ‘pedigree’ – a looser, more impressionistic kind of causality. Here, the tendency is to foreground one author while ignoring others, connecting the dots retrospectively in a search for authority rather than for genuine origins. In philosophy, tracing an idea back to Plato is always a safe bet. This habit also feeds into the ancient topos that everything must have a beginning – an act of creation from which everything else flows, or the ‘once upon a time’ with which all stories begin. We instinctively shy away from narratives that fade into the mists of time. They feel unsatisfying.

But if we question genealogy itself – how do ideas emerge, and how are they actually transmitted? I would not presume to offer a theory – I am far too confused for that. I might, however, look askance at theory, and ask reality for suggestions.

While vacationing on the Greek island of Hydra, I found this pointer:

This photo shows the entrance to a ramshackle house in a hamlet some distance from the town, at the foot of a stairway leading to a large Orthodox church. When I passed by for the first time, a dour elderly woman was sitting out front. On the left gatepost sat a crude statuette – likely Confucius. On the right, a Guanyin figure, serene and recognisably Buddhist.

How these two icons from the Sinic world found their way to this house, and how they came to occupy places of honour, I do not know. Nor is it clear what they mean to the people who live there – or to the neighbours. But they are there. And I would not be surprised if, a few decades from now, some form of local cult emerged – blending fragments of their original significance with elements of local lore. What matters is the experience. If those who placed the figures there felt them to be ‘useful’ – a vague but telling word – they may well become objects of reverence, however informally.

When practice gives a word its meaning

Chris Wickham, a medieval historian, has researched in painstaking detail the emergence of Italian city communes in the twelfth century (see Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century by Chris Wickham). He writes: ‘The communes at their inception were very informal bodies.’ They were inchoate political structures. The citizens, he suggests, ‘were most likely making it up as they went along; they may well have thought of themselves as simply modifying earlier forms of political practice’. (The phrase ‘sleepwalking into a new world’ in the title suggests the existence of pre-existing institutions, discovered by chance. This is not the case: experience made them up. If anything, it is a case of convergent evolution – the process whereby organisms not closely related (i.e. not monophyletic) independently evolve similar traits in response to similar environments or ecological pressures.)

A good example is the term ‘consul’. In the age of the communes, it referred to a regularly rotating group of magistrates, chosen – or at least validated – by a conscious urban collectivity. These magistrates exercised de facto autonomy over warfare, justice, taxation, and legislation. But the word ‘consul’ had already existed for at least a century as a vague label for a city leader. It was an empty shell. The experience of self-government, and the institutions it gave rise to, gradually filled the term with meaning, depth, and content.

The chain of causation – if one dares to use arrows – ran from experience to institutions to concept, not the other way round.

Experience comes first. Ideas follow. Or to put it differently: ideas consolidate and give shape to what has already been lived. They are always tributary to experience. In genetic terms, this would resemble Lamarckian evolution more than Darwinian – a shaping through use, not inheritance.

The post was first published on DeepDip.

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