A New Kosmopolitikal Ideology

In plain language, Kosmopolitika, a project that’s about a month old, works like this:

Two Russians who were born just before the end of the USSR and who now live in the EU and the US — respectively, me and Boris Shoshitaishvili, an interdisciplinary scholar studying and contributing to planetary thought — spend a couple of hours a week engaged in a certain kind of thinking out loud, in conversation with each other and with callers who join by Zoom (though I want to look into using a phone line).

The recordings of these conversations become the raw material for further reflection and creative work.

We isolate the most compelling ideas that were brought up and write them up on cards, like this:

Only three conversations in, we already have the beginnings of a card deck, or a catalogue of ideas. If we lay them out on a table, some bigger images start to emerge.

A couple of cards postulate as their premise that ideas are invisible¹ life forms we humans have been in a relationship with. If that’s so, our emerging card deck is the equivalent of a naturalist’s notes: we’re mapping out an ecology of ideas — and ideology, if you will — that these conversations allow us to travel through.

When Boris and I were just coming up with this project, we thought that we could develop a good rhythm if we make the first three sessions of every cycle totally unconstrained — we would let the conversation flow where it wants to, and just point out to each other ideas we notice around, and what they do, and how they seem to relate to each other; and then each fourth conversation could be more focused: we’d go through our notes, our idea cards, and try to make sense of them.

That’s what we’ll be doing on May 1, at 1pm ET / 7pm CET, live, here on Substack. You can join by clicking the button below:

I was going to say more about the threads that I see and find interesting, and how the Homo Idearum card seems to tie them together, but it’s now almost midnight in Málaga, and I’ve got a wife and a dog and a couple of jobs that I need to attend to, so if you want to hear what I think — or, better yet, share what you think — you’ll have to come to the stream.

See you tomorrow!

— Nikita

1. Under normal circumstances.