To my great delight, I was asked to review Jan Broekman's brilliant new work, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Springer Nature, 2023). The work is published as Volume 8 of the Series Law and Visual Jurisprudence, for which I serve as an Advisory Editor. Broekman's exploration is described in the following terms on its publisher's website:
Covers the cognition concept not only by means of analog but also by equivalent digital thought formations
Explores a new concept of the Subject-in-digital thought named the “Self-E"
Provides basics for a semiotic analysis of cognition related to analog, digital, AI and Quantum approaches and data
Knowledge in Change approaches ancient and perplexing issues of the organization of human collectives within a rationalized understanding of the world in which these collectives function (exteriorization) and the investigation of the human individual as disaggregated components of that world of human social relations (internalization). These are usually articulated by knowledge guardians as issues of phenomenology (a philosophy of experience; meaning through lived experience), epistemology (theories of knowledge; the rationalization of reality) and intersubjectivity (shared perceptions of reality; the experience of knowledge as social relations, the rationalization of human interaction at every level of complexity). All of these currents and problems presume the humanity as the only or the central subject of interest.
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It is with that in mind that in this and several posts that follow I will review Knowledge in Change. This Part I focuses on the book's Preface. I provide an introduction to the form and perspective of that review and introduce the key elements of Broekamn's book as well as my own engagement with it. Additional posts will consider each of the nine chapters that make up this work.
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Part 2: Chapter 1 (Minds, Moons and Cognition)
Part 3: Chapter 2 (Fluidity and Flow)
Part 4: Chapter 3 (Post-Dialectics)
Part 5: Chapter 4 (Flow and Firstness)
Part 6: Chapter 5 (Interludes: Changing Worlds Changing Words)
Part 7: Chapter 6 ("The Non-Naïve-Natural")Part 8: Chapter 7 ( "Plurality and the Natural")
Part 9: Chapter 8 ("Rearguards of Subjectivity)"
Part 10: Chapter 9 ("Conversions Convert Us All")
Full discussion draft available for download SSRN here.
An encounter with Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023).
Part I Introduction and Preface
Jan Broekman has been my friend, colleague, mentor and teacher for many years. Broekman is a pioneer and critical pathbreaker within the broad family of semiotics—especially as it touches on law and legal education, and bio-ethics. He authored more than twenty books on Philosophy, Law, Education and Cultural Studies and numerous articles in scientific Journals in various languages.
Jan Broekman has helped me see the world not just with new eyes, but to extend the range of analytic probing through all the senses. An openness to more comprehensive sensory inputs, provocations, irritants, stimuli, and absences, better reveals the multi-linear and polyphonous flows of the rich semiosis of knowledge as object, as a set of symbols representing the object, and as the way in which these objects and symbols become the architecture of social relations. Knowledge, in this sense, cannot be divorced from or considered autonomous of the human in the image of which it has been created, curated, and communicated. (C f., Jean-Pau Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Philip Mairet, trans.; London: Methuen, 1948 [1946], p. 55)).
Knowledge, then, is another way in which the person, the collective, and social relations, are first humanized, and thus humanized, projected as an into the world around them—to perceive is to distinguish or to group; to understand is to give those groups values and purpose. The subject and the perspective remain stubbornly "Human, All Too Human" (Nietzsche 1908 Alexander Harvey trans.). This is a sort of a passive-reactive actualization of things (they come into being by acts of identification), an equally passive symbolization of things (what is identified stands for something else—reductive essentialization), and a strategic organization of things and their symbology into a passively ordered universe. This is the core “stuff” of semiotics, not in its useful but micro-level function as a mechanics of micro-meaning making but rather as the philosophical psychology of antiphony (αντίφωνος [antiphōnos]) to stimulation (input from the senses, experiences, and the like).
None of this matters until these polyphonies of knowledge can be made common—one of the literal meanings of the Latin communicare (otherwise, to share, divide out; communicate, impart, inform; join, unite, participate in). That process of communicating itself embodies its own semiotics—the objectification of words; their symbology, and their function to convey meaning. That meaning , though, is not of the object-symbol that communication expresses. Meaning common to human collectives—not meaning inherent in the thing defined is precisely what captures the essence of norm, values, language, philosophy, and the mechanics of social relations however complex its framework and structures. (Ruminations 42: Conformity and Forbidden Knowledge--The First Rule of Fight Club, the Invisible Hand and the Semiotics of Obedience). The same applies to the technologies of communication which themselves also serve or are constituted as a form of what is communicated (La révolution technologique (sous-titrage en français).
This is, in effect, what Jan Broekman has been trying to teach us, and himself, for the greater part of a lifetime of extracting the essence of a philosophy of semiotics, and with it the essence of our humanism—from the depths of humanity’s transcendent self-absorption to the heights of its immanence with the worlds around and in them. No matter what humans talk or think about, they are thinking and speaking about themselves. But because individual humans die, that conversation and reflection changes with time; and because no two human beings are exactly aligned, the act of communication and its object (knowledge) are as much the acts of collective coherence and efforts to know things in themselves. In his own language of a lifetime--that the foundations of social relations (especially as expressed through or as law) law are concealed in a specific image of a person.
In his most recently published book, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023) (ISBN 978-3-031-23000-4; 200 pp) Jan Broekman has taken a deeper dive into the fundamental questions of the intertwining of knowledge with its technologies in the age of the digital and the era of human subjectivity.
No, my knowledge is not a private and personal possession. On the contrary, the doors to the treasures of knowing are complicated instruments—and one of them is their dependence on cultural patterns which change their masters and participants. It seems difficult today to peacefully connect our traditional Ego with a modern Self. (Broekman, supra., p. v).
With Knowledge in Change, Jan Broekman invites us on a journey that assumed its modern form with the unification of the German Reich but which has now assumed a vastly different form, one enhanced by technology. The world of the spirit has been digitalized; reality exists more intensely in virtual than in corporeal space. Cultural patterns have been imprinted onto platforms, the masters and participants of which have become producers and consumers of knowledge. Knowledge remains neither private nor personal but the individual has been reconstituted as its own image. The ego and its self no longer inhabit the world of Jung or Freud; indeed, our Ego may well have lost its Self. Technology has exposed the changes that are usually veiled beneath the mumbo-jumbo of the philosopher, the discretionary tantrums of the administrator and the cultivated avarice of the merchants of things, ideas, and norms.
In this post and those that follow, I attempt a conversation with the always brilliant and profound insights that Broekman weaves together. We start here with the overarching points Broekman conveys in his Preface.
Broekman presents us with the fundamental conundrum of the post-modern: the “peaceful connection” between what he calls “our traditional Ego” and “a modern Self.” And that three legged conundrum encapsulated in their respective cages: the Ego, Self, and their connection. That has provided the problemmatique for generations of philosophers from before the end of the 19th century. From a contemporary Jungian point of view, “It may be helpful to consider our ego as being conscious and our Self having sentience.” (Oliver Dale, “Self, Ego, and Suicide,” Analytical Psychology 67(3) (2022) 796-816, 797). The layering of intersubjectivity adds spice, of course, adding to ego and self—their alter egos and alter-sentience (e.g., Chase Wesley Raymond, “Intersubjectivity, Normativity, and Grammar,” Social Psychology Quarterly 82(2) (2019) 182-204; Helena de Preester, “From ego to alter ego: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and a layered approach to intersubjectivity,” Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 7(1) (2008) 133-142). To this, it might be even more helpful to consider the connectivity of ego and self as concepts of mass consciousness and mass sentience. (Mario Orozco-Guzmán, Hada Soria-Escalante, Jeannet Quiroz-Bautista, “Narcissistic isomorphisms: The ego, the masses, the Urvater, and the alterity,” Psychotherapy and Politics International e1600. https://doi-org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1002/ppi.1600).
If that were all, there would be very little indeed. But Broekman intends to dig deeper in a quite interesting way. Where most might focus on the connection between Ego and Self, Broekman recasts each as an object-symbol and then embeds them in the complicated web of meanings--the traditional Ego and the modern Self, the connection between which is decreed peaceful. That is, for example, the simple second sentence of the Preface, starts from the idea of Ego as both a thing (object) and its symbol. Here he hints at the dynamic element, as well as its semiotic matrix the exploration of which is to come—the “dependence on cultural patterns which change their masters and participants.” (Preface, p. v). And brings us back to the crux of the problem of the conscious and the sentient, of the ego and the self.
This sets up the fundamental contradiction, which like the notion of principal contradiction of Chinese Leninism (Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937)), will propel Broekman’s semiotics of the ties that bind the conscious and the sentient from its current stage of historical development into the next era. This is what Broekman finds fascinating—a word that is of critical significance throughout the work. What does it mean to “fascinate”? It etymology carries with it an origin in enchantment and bewitching. It’s Latin derivation, fascinatus, evokes bewitchment, and its own derivation from the Latin fascinus speaks to charms, spells and witchcraft. One speaks here, Broekman speaks here, of the language (textual, oral, visual, pictural—and ultimately digital) as a language of spells, incantation, and charms the power of which is the essence of intersubjective semiotics. Indeed, the etymology of a word like spell (from the Anglo-French espeller) invokes the act of signification, of speaking a name to give it meaning. The Latin derivation of the word incantation (incantare) suggests a signification beyond the power of its object to avoid—magic!
But here is the leap that is itself the essence of the book: the semiotics of the intersubjective ego-self is no longer the realm of humanity, whether one approaches this one individual at a time or from the big bang of the intersubjective ego-self. Nor is that connection now framed by the temporal flow from the traditional to the modern in both cases attached to the human ego-self. There is now another actor in the realm of intersubjectivity—and it is not human, though made in the image of humanity. Digitalization has liberated the ego-self from the static and temporally instantaneous constraints of the mirror, of text, or of image—of the human. Intersubjectivity is now incarnated in technology and the hardware that provides its body; and it is increasingly animated extra-human intersubjectivity. In the form of the non-human ego-self, what is mislabeled Artificial intelligence, a new actor has been brought into the room of the ego-self. And that ego-self is no longer entirely human though made in humanity’s intersubjective image.
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The language of the intersubjective now again assumes a fascinating character—of spells, incantations, and charms—the bewitch its collectives into specific imaginaries of shared perception. We have all no entered a labyrinth of holograms that can bewitch us into any lifeworld that suits its community. The human machine connection has blasted the old conceits of human self-actualization and the closed binary represented by the ego-self. The machine between the ego and the self—the Self-E—now changes the basis for a phenomenology of knowledge (of the self and everything within its sentient range). Or perhaps better from Broekman’s perspective, we have, as a human collective morphed from the intersubjectivities of Michael Crichton’s Westworld (MGM, 1973), where the machine human interactions after machine liberation were understood as dangerously aberrational (a flaw producing life in a killing machine) to the television series Westworld (HBO, 2016-2022), in which carbon and silicon life forms interacted more ambiguously. This, indeed, is what will fascinate!
The Preface to Broekman’s Knowledge in Change underlines this trajectory of the exploration of what had been the self-centered phenomenology of knowledge, to a reliable phenomenological epistemology. That is he moves the reader from a focus of a self-centered philosophy of experience, to an experiential theory of knowledge now mediated by and through machines and technology. He explains:
The reason is that actual semiotics became rapidly covered by the digital culture, which replaces the traditional cognition processes by an all-around grip in the sense of conversion. This process, and with it the observations concerning the Subject of such a new form of knowledge formation, is the basic idea of this Book. (Broekman, Knowledge in Change, Preface, p. v).
Broekman suggest that the transformation of the Subject into a Self and the Self into a Selfie now replaces the Subject with the Self-E, “which determines the Self in the context of our digital culture.” (Ibid.). To this Broekman adds the concept of conversion—a translation of sorts the template of which is the transformation of the analogue to the digital is now interwoven with notions of cognition. One moves simultaneously from Subject to Self-E and from cognition to conversion of communicative types grounded in the intersubjectivity of human and tech (hardware and software).
And there it is: “The decentering of the subjects polar position became the fundamental process in the second half of the twentieth century, and it changed the world-wide structure of human cognition” (Ibid., p. vi). And that change shifted the emphasis of intersubjectivity from interpretation (the Gadamerian project) to conversion.
Conversion is a central concept that should provide an appropriate understanding of knowledge in digital worlds. What the term ‘epistemology’ in the analogue world meant is going to be replaced and intensified by what ‘conversion’ means in the digital world—far beyond a translation from one field of meaning to another.” (Ibid., p. vii).
And that itself transforms the very notion of semiotics. In the face of the technological revolutionary reality, semiotics is meant to liberate itself from its alignment with a specific type of language, to a semiospheric focus on the differentiation among analogue, digital and quantum languages—for which (again) conversion provides the basis for both signification and intersubjective constitution. (Ibid, pp. vi-vii). As Broekman explains it: “The term Semiosphere which is introduced in the following pages is therefore not in the first placer focused on ‘semiotic’ dimensions but on the ‘sphere’ which characterizes the social and psychological features of a ‘Self.’” (Ibid., p. vii).
One speaks here of a human-machine interface in which one is aware of the way it provides a means for human to interface with themselves for which the digital is a conduit. At the same time, and from the other side, it also opens the door to an examination of the way that it provides a means for generative AI to interface with itself for which the human is a conduit. It is not just the human body, but the hardware in which machine intelligence operates that each reflexively produces extra sensorial awareness. It is at this point that the trajectories of the philosophies of the self and of the epistemologies that it is heir to come to an ed. A new era—one in which the self can only be understood as a reflection of its projection against and through machine intelligence, and vice versa—has now emerged. And with it theories of semiotics, phenomenology and epistemology must be converted into a language of the intertwining of the ego-self, its Self-E, and its machine image in the language of he semiospheric. This is what fascinates. The journey begins.
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