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.
But the book does much more than
that. It provides a basis for re-thinking the fundamentals of the way
in which one understands the interface between humanity and its
increasingly autonomous technology, and between the idea of humanity as
innate in itself against the reality that the human may now be more
intensely manifested in its interfacing with increasingly
self-generative machine intelligence and the hardware within which it
resides. The consequences for everything from philosophy to a philosophy
of knowledge, to core insights for the organization of social relations
within a world that is now populated by carbon and silicon based
intelligence may be quite profound. Human social collectives already
fear and desire this new world--the engagement with artificial
intelligence and its consequences is but a tip of that iceberg. While
humanity started this century secure in its conceit that it was the
center of all things, by century's end a very different form of
intersubjectivity may well be the basis of the ruling ideology for
humanity within its natural and machine orders.
It is with that in mind that in this and several posts that follow I will review Knowledge in Change. This Part 2 examines Chapter 1 of the book. Entitled "Minds, Moon, and Cognition" the chapter's focus is on the way that cognition has changed in the age of the digital. Not that cognition itself has changed, but rather the introduction of the digital--datafication, the creation of the virtual self, the mirroring connection between the physical and virtual worlds, joined together through interactive interfaces (self-selfie and self-E) in which both sides are capable of autonomy, though tied together by their humanity (whether in carbon or silicon based casings), makes it possible to re-concieve of the "subject" (the core of cognition ) and its other, the "object," as plural subjects. In the world of the virtual there may be no subject-object, but iterations of the subject and mirroring images of itself projected outward. In simpler terms, in the age of the virtual the physical merge in the movement between the physical and the simulated.
Cognition, then, in a world now existing in physical and virtual space becomes an expression of a constant flow of data between and among them. Cognition, is a snapshot of the processes Broekman calls conversion. Additional posts will consider each of the other nine chapters that make up this work.These self-referencing systems are, in a sense both all too human and at the same time collectively supra-human in their good, bad, or indifferent habits of engaging with the stimuli that animate their programming. The problem, then, can be understood in semiotic terms. Where the language of social relations shifts from text to code, a transposition of the mechanics of orthodoxy is required. That mechanics requires both translation and quality control measures. That is it requires a re-invention of the signification of the signs and objects through which meaning is described and applied in social relations. It also requires a new supervisory structures--from the discretionary decision making of human collectives (public and private operating as an exogenous force against heresy), to the automated self learning machines that serve that purpose in the ecologies of enormous data flows (public and private analytics ted to judgments of aggregated data representing a quantified vision of social relations in macro and micro relations and endogenous (within) them).(Coding Orthodoxy; Automated Law; and Quality Control in AI--CAIDP (Center for AI and Digital Policy): OPEN AI (FTC 2023)).
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")Part 11: An Epilogue (Chapter 9.5 ("Climate and Change")
Full discussion draft available for download SSRN here.
3. Chapter 1 (Minds, Moons and Cognition).
Having posed the central problem, Broekman must start somewhere. And that ‘somewhere’ is cognition. The semiotics of that objectification of cognition is itself fascinating, in the sense that Broekman uses the term throughout his explorations: of spellcasting as intersubjective semiotics; invoking signification by speaking the name of an object, and in that act of bewitchment giving it meaning. It is in this sense, perhaps that one can approach the biblical act of creation as a naming (Gen 2:118-19 (Adam naming all of the creatures brought before him by God), and by naming giving a thing both form and essence. It is as well at the root of the classical Chinese rhetoric of Guiguzi in the notion of intelligent naming--明名 (Míng míng) (Guiguzi: China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric (Hui Wu (trans); Carbndale: SIU Press, 2016), p. 59-60). Guiguzi speaks of Ming (名)--of naming, of defining accurately, and of drawing distinctions;--and ming (明) of enlightenment, intelligence, or that which shines or sparkles. Ming míng (明名) is translated as naming. It is a concept that itself was closely though controversially tied to that of shi (实) of actuality, truth, or essence of the thing named (ibid., p. 60, n-26); but also to the act of untruth (of speaking falsely) in its form as 名明名 (Míng míng míng). It is in this way that cognition fascinates. And it is in this form that Broekman is able to introduce the problemmatique of cognition in the age of the Self-E, planted squarely at the starting point of the re-naming of “self,”, “ego,” “conversion” and “intersubjectivity”—all of which together are themselves the description of the identifying characteristics—the means of facially recognizing—the re-created digital self. A self that is more out of itself (in the reality of its digital image) than in itself (as its corporeal manifestation).
Broekman, however, does not start with the imaginaries of the self, but with its cognition against its background. That is, he starts by suggesting that one recognizes, one can approach cognition, not by a focus on the self, but by deducing the self from out of the background against which the self is visible. Charles Fourier’s[1] vision, Benjamin’s Parisian Passages and notes on the Concept of History,[2] and the views of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Broekman, supra, p. 1) revolving around climate change as a consequence of the labors of humanity—with quite different effects depending on the century, forms the basis for a consideration of the way that cognition is manifested in the construction of the ego-self from the imaginaries of the world built around it. That background is posited as both consequential, and as active. The active element revolves around human labor, understood in its broadest sense of active engagement in and with the world; the consequence of course, is built around the effects of such labor. But cognition is also built into the valuation (assessment) of labor on background effects—moving from a positive to a negative framing over the course of two centuries (Broekman, supra, p. 1-2). “The question raises again: was there a new reality articulated when Fournier spoke about the moons, the planet, the climate? Or did he speak about himself, the human being, its dreams, the freedom, and the importance of related thought formations? (Broekman, supra. p. 2). And thus the problem of cognition as the starting point, but one that has or will take a turn in the digital age.
Broekman starts the consideration of cognition by focusing on that old chestnut of modern philosophy—is human reality made in its own image? (Ibid., pp. 2-6). The answer, of course, should be: yes of course it is. But that would be too simple—and simple minded. It is in the journey from the outside into the cognitive universe of the human—from its ego to its self, that things get more interesting. It’s fascinating aspect is in the very possibility that because the universe is indifferent to cognition—that is that the universe is as it is (as the core initial Biblical observation reminds us, “without form and void” (Gen. 1:2)—that it acquires form only through a process of ming míng (明名), of intelligent naming. And thus the semiotics of cognition suggests that what human speak about as reality is merely little more than their effort to name and arrange that which is indifferent to the naming and to the arranging.
But Broekman reminds us that human do not think in that way. Human are attracted to a different rationalization of cognition, as one engaged in the titanic task of masting meaning. To that end Broekman correctly points to Husserl (Broekman, supra, p. 2). But meaning mastery, in this sense, cannot be about meaning at all, but rather meaning is itself a semiotic signification of ordering; that is that meaning is or ought to be about the cognition of intelligent naming, and by naming of attributing characteristics to the object made real by its naming. For Broekman, Husserl provides a useful foundation, but one founded on the alignment of order, meaning, fact.
It is important to underline the coherence of visual and lingual approaches in view of their sign-relevance, which tends to be linked to traditional forms of understanding the genesis of knowledge . . .as a subject which was a center of specific activities that creates a stable and manageable pattern of thoughts, ideas, issues, and even data. (Broekman, supra, p. 2).
It is the stable and manageable pattern of thoughts, ideas, issues, and data that fascinates Broekman. Here classical semiotics provides the gateway from the knowing subject to its context: socialization; dynamic othering within a peer collective of meaning makers. A key point here is the role of visual semiotics—and the need for a necessary exploration of its connection to cognition.
A virtual semiology was in the minds of those who focused on the study of signs, but where do we find access towards a deeper understanding of the actual issue? An answer might surprise. We find it in the traditional underpinning of the Subject as a Self—which of course, is a primary power of the Self in itself! (Broekman, supra. pp. 2-3).
This gets one to the proper positioning of cognition within and entwined with a self-referencing epistemology that passes as the universe of knowledge, now better understood as posting the limits and vessels of human knowledge. This leads Broekman to what he describes as “a most remarkable insight, which relates to semiotics: an understanding and exploration of the Human Self does form the basis for any unfolding of cognition.” (Broekman, supra; p. 3-4. That insight, in turn produces another and far more potent notion—that epistemology as an expression of the (individual and collective) Self, that is that epistemology as a manifestation of knowing/naming, is itself the intertwining of two processes. The first is that of cognition, the second is that of conversion. (Ibid., p. 2). What technology has made more manifestly unavoidable is the realization that data becomes knowledge only through a process of conversion from something external to something internal to the self (and here a link to phenomenology which is to come later in the discussion). That knowledge, then, is not about the thing itself, but about the cognition of the thing. It is in this sense that Broekman is fascinated by Fournier, who is able in his own inadvertent way, to describe the self-reflexivity of virtual semiotics as the unity of the human self and the planet. I might have been more inclined to suggest that what Fournier (and Broekman) were doing was suggesting the unity of human self as the planet.
What changes, what breaks the pattern of development, is what Broekman understands as the transition of the (self) constitution of reality from the analogue to the digital (Broekman, supra, 4). Critical to this leap is the convergence of the idea of consciousness (ego) and sentience (self) in the notion of the split-I, the plural character of each subject. Having created a space between the conscious and the sentient, it is then possible to insert the entirety of the world in the space between them. That is possible as a matter of course in a world characterized by the analogue—characterized by the invocation of physical signals (the visual, the textual, the observable, even if only in relation to the observer). Digital expressivities upend the ancient conceits of cognition precisely because it is not attached to either self or ego (consciousness or sentience. Instead it proceeds from both and transforms the mechanisms of intersubjectivity from an internal to an external reflexivity between the self and expressions of itself. Cognition is still grounded in conversion ((“cognition (i.e. acquiring by thought, experience and the senses as grounded in selective capacities), and conversion (i.e. the change or the causing to change form one form to another”; Broekman, supra, p. 9) , However, the interface between input and output has changed. The ego-self, always plural (Broekman, supra. p. 4) , now becomes conscious through an interaction not with itself but with its virtual self, what will become later in Broekman’s elaboration as the Self-E.
One should on the contrary understand the new plurality which dominates cognition as well as conversion today. In other, rather absolute words, one must conclude: the digital is not the new form caused by the split of the split ego. But one could nevertheless suggest that the digital is the other Otherness which creates intersubjectivity and thus the social dimensions of life on the planet. (Broekman, supra., p. 5).
At last one comes to the eureka moment and Broekman’s critical fascination: this new understanding of cognition in the digital is marked by a change of sign with a movement of the subject from the conscious (ego) to the sentient (self). The imagery of a walk in the woods drives this change home (ibid., pp. 5-6). The play on words is brilliant: one starts a walk in the woods (www), yet almost as soon as one starts one consults a map app for directions. A walk in the woods simultaneously is also a walk in the www, the world wide web.” Cognition is at once analogue (the woods) and digital (the virtual and interactive woods of the Internet). This is both a substantial change from a walk in the woods with a map, or with a compass because both of those were in the world. The digital connection takes one out of the world into its simulation.
What follows? Reality is in the simulation only confirmed by the actual passage in the woods. Simulation is the plural self and cognition the sense of self in the world of the analogue and in the virtual world that makes the analogue world clear, understandable—and real ("Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era: Of the Simulation of Signification and of the Modeling and Objectification of Meaning Making" Remarks Delivered at the "The Rearguard of Subjectivity In Honor of Jan M. Broekman’s 90th Birthday" ).” Indeed, in Broekman’s story of the “www” it is not clear whether the self is in the act of the walk in the woods or in the picture of the self in the walk, or in the digital simulation of the wood within which a walk is possible while walking through its simulation in the www. Cognition, then, is simulation, or is simulated. Its conformation may be located in the analogue but its signification is now wholly digital. “Once more, we repeat: the Self became the Selfie and then the Self-E in the New Plural, which is dominated by digital thought patterns. It functions like the Subject in earlier centuries of cognition but now in the form of the selfie resp. Self-E.” (Broekman, supra. p. 6).
It is on this bedrock of cognition that Broekman then introduces five consequential subjects that are briefly considered in turn: (1) Mirroring; (2) Networks (“To Grasp, to Fit”); (3) the Null set; (4) Intersubjectivity; and (5) Conversion.
(1) Mirroring. Mirroring is offered as a metaphor encircling cognition. It is offered as act and datum (Broekman, supra., pp. 6-7). Humans see themselves in everything and everything as themselves. Cognition, in this sense is the never ending act of Narcissus, who, turned into a flower, became the mirror of others who would then behold themselves in and through the object into which Narcissus had been transformed (Plutarch). The mirror, though, is also the foundation of replication; and of patterns, Broekman speaks of the mirroring that is the chessboard; he might well have spoken of virtually any board game in any culture—Go for example (Jiang Shigong, "The rise of great powers and the revival of civilization——The Taiwan issue under the "protracted war of civilization'" [强世功 《大国崛起与文明复兴——“文明持久战”下的台湾问题》]). But more immediately the looking glass; Lewis Carroll perhaps intuited it best had it best in his books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Both are quintessential mirrors. But more than that each suggests the power o virtual worlds to both reflect and shape our own. Mirroring, of course, seeps imperceptibly into the digital, as well as the imaginary. One can think of New York City as a space, but also of its mirror as a grid on a map, or in a painting by Mondrian (e.g. Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43); New York: MoMA); or its visual transformation in the form of its subway map that reshapes the city even as it offers a guide to transport within it (John Xu, “Map Sensitivity vs. Map Dependency: A Case Study of Subway Maps’ Impact on Passenger Route Choices in Washington DC.,” Behavioral Science 7 (2017) 71). Here mirroring geographies moves the signification of the space from the physical to the virtual; where the city and its image change places of primacy. To take Broekman’s intuition further—mirroring cognition in the digital brings us back to the walk in the woods and the world wide web. The ultimate mirror—the simulation—and the transformation of phenomenology from physical to virtual experience (Rosapia Lauro Grotto, “Symmetrization, Mirroring and External Reality: An ‘Inner’ Perspective,” European Review 29(2) (2020) 181-196). The mirroring becomes a bridge. The bridge a means of conversion; and conversion the foundation for a cognition as a sentience of perception in physical and virtual space (Harrington et al., “Is Perception Reality? Using Person-in-Context Simulation to Promote Empathic Understanding of Dementia Among Nurse Practitioner Students,” Nursing Educ. Perspectives 42 (2021) 377-379).
(2) Networks (“To Grasp, to Fit”). If cognition and conversion represent a balancing between the positive and negative embedded in intersubjectivity, Broekman argues, that balancing and its traditional anchoring are upendedin the face of the digital. “The proximity of thinking and artitioning ina world delineated by intersubjectivity is lost in continuously revised coherences of data and techniques which are in essence digital.” (Broekman, supra, p. 9), If the traditional partition of body and soul, of ego and self, of the physical from the spiritual centers the human person in the business of cognition, and epistemology at the core of cognition, and phenomenology at the core of epistemology (that is one proceeds from the body to the sense of the body, to the recognition of the body as something apart, to the derivation of knowledge from that sentient separation, to the conformation of that knowledge in experience) becomes detached from its mirroring—that is from itself, then the inter-subject itself becomes something quite different. Interiority of the subject and itself as the basis of cognition is replaced by the exteriority of the subject and its digitalized image. This digitalized image is itself a mirroring of the old ego-self but with one difference that changes everything—the self can reach into the mirror and mirror image can reach into the self. Within Broekman’s field of vision, “That technology relegates any eccentricity of the self: Philosophy became a networked form of intersubjectivity.” (Broekman, supra, p. 9).
And there it is. The nature of this networked intersubjectivity pulses with the dynamic interplay of differentiation related to their enforcement of contouring on the one hand, and to their mutual shadowing on the other. “These powerful dynamic processes are often disregarded—even when such simple terms like “to know” or “to grasp” are used on the one hand and “to fit” on the other.” (Broekman, supra., p. 10). To “grasp” and “to fit” in the digital age shifts the dynamic of cognition and conversion, to one emphasizing conversion as a predicate to knowing. Networked intersubjectivity requires routers, pathways, mirroring, and mapping—they require an interface where the ego-self (consciousness-sentience) and its virtual self-E can process experience. “the closeness of digital thinking and operating on the one hand and human behavior on the other makes us experience our body and mind as a very different part of a universal scale. The latter unfolds with the smartphone in our hands and the comput老子er technologies in our minds.” (Broekman, supra., p. 11). That touches on language and pathways to cognition. One now grasps and fits our semiotics in the language of coding (ibid., pp. 11-12).
(3) the Null set. That brings us to the core of the fullness of knowledge—the empty spaces of no thing and nothing. The basis of knowledge is the impossibility of the absence of an opposite. Form is understood in its juxtaposition with form-less; a thing is grasped in the shadow of no-thing. The binaries of knowledge are as old as the effort to produce meaning—relational, contextual, and constantly in dynamic engagement with its “not itself.” To this end the mirror concept, considered earlier, plays a role. “There is no mirroring if the Self has not created an Other through its mirroring. If the “I” is completely self -sufficient and beyond relations, then there is no cognition possible.” (Broekman, p. 12-13). Indeed it is impossible where even the self cannot be understood as a singularity since consciousness requires a sense of not-conscience, and sentience requires knowledge of its meaning. And off we go.
But nothingness does not necessarily suggest the inevitability of duality (though it is much easier to build collectives and manage the human where one posits the duality as the basis for cognition). Broekman draws on ancient and more contemporary theologies of the nature of the Divine—a wholeness that is itself an aggregation both of itself and around its creations. One can draw as well on Laozi (老子). Here one at last draws one’s eye away from the divide between the thing and no-thing to the human intersubjectivity that imposes that break in rationalizing the human and humanity in the world (Qinjie James Wang, “Thing-ing and No-Thing in Heidegger, Kant, and Laozi,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15(2) (2016) 159-174).
(4) Intersubjectivity. One might question where all of this reshaping of mirroring, of the network and of the “thing” that “is not” is going. At best, its relevance to the digitalization of the self (as selfie and Self-E), and more importantly, the re-creation of the human in and through techno-electronic objects (the hardware and software that constitutes the basis of silicon based life made in the image of the human) remains obscure. That obscurity is lifted, where one begins to embed these notions, and their detachment from the consciousness-sentience of the physical individual (and their collectives) in the concept of intersubjectivity. There will be more to be said on that subject in the course of the elaboration of Broekman’s re-visioning of reality. But for a first run, Broekman has this to say:
First intersubjectivity must be (re)opened to include both the “no-thing” and the exteriority of the Self-E to the traditionally intensely narcissistic and dystopic love affair between consciousness (eg0) and sentience (Self). The plural subject is now a networked subject, a simulated subject, a digital subject, a subject from within which everything in the universe may be arranged (interiority), and a subject that continues to make the world in its own image—except that this image is now both mirrored within and virtually outside. (Broekman, supra, pp. 15-16 (“it concerns ultimately the position of the Self related to another Self in one’s proper Self!” ibid., 15)).
Second, this intersubjectivity mimics internally the self-referencing nature of creation as an act of naming that flows outward to the constitution of divinity (understood in relation to an in the image of its worshippers). But it is also the manifestation of a return to Eden where the Self has gorged in the Tree of Life (“And the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the Tree of Life, and eat and live for ever.” (Gen. 3:22)). That is exactly what humanity has done. In the form of the creation of the virtual image of itself—the virtual self, the Self-E, that now lives forever in its silicon bodies, and in its own Earth ( the world human created for it in the world wide web). Humanity has (re)built Eden, and having been locked out of permanence in physical form (except through the act of procreation—another aspect of inter-subjectivity, of mirroring and the no-thing worth further study), humanity has now built its own Eden, sown its own Tree of Good and Evil, and its own Tree of Life, and having gorged on both has remade his own image of the world in the mirrored images of his own (re)creation as a silicon life form.
Third, this intersubjectivity has a kick. Creating the world in the image of humanity, and living as if that world functioned as anticipated in the interiorized realities of human cognition of things produces the no-thing that bites back. Evil, in this sense, loses its moral sensibility (always a tool for the management of the masses within an orthodox framework of the intersubjective), and becomes instead the manifestation of the null of a thing, or better put, of the negation of inter-subjective realities. Broekman offers climate change as his principal example. “Any attention for the negative is to take seriously in our days of threatening climate changes determining many modern thought patterns.” (Broekman, supra. p. 16. The implications take the intersubjective beyond good and evil, certainly (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Helen Zimmerin (trans) 1909-13; Project Gutenberg eBook #4363 (2019)) to the creation-negattion of a thing in a context in which the binary life-death/good-bad etc. are stripped away. This is the semiotics world of Frankenstein (Marry Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus (1818 edition) Project Gutenberg eBook #41445). It takes one, as well to the intersubjectivities of the movie Prometheus, where humanity serves as its own creator-destroyer in a world of plural internal and external selves (“It is Time to Redeem Prometheus,” Esquire (2021)).
(5) Conversion. And, at last, one arrives at the chapter’s destination—cognition as a totentanz with its partner conversion. Conversion serves as the Leninism to cognition’s Marx—its is the means by which the intersubjective can serve as a disciplinary tool for the creation and protection of the lifeworlds or imaginaries that are the foundation of the sentience of the human conscience.
To become another or new person through the espousal of new, or at least very different, values and norms is in fact one of the basic properties of man. This is the primordial power of conversion which enriches life with new themes and multiple disclosures of existential dimensions. (Broekman, supra, p. 17)
True enough—but still human, all too human in a fundamentally ironic sense (Nietzsche, Human All Too Human (“The actor cannot, at last, refrain, even in moments of the deepest pain, from thinking of the effect produced by his deportment and by his surroundings—for example, even at the funeral of his own child: he will weep at his own sorrow and its manifestations as though he were his own audience. . . When anyone, during a long period, and persistently, wishes to appear something, it will at last prove difficult for him to be anything else. The calling of almost every man, even of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation of deportment, with a copying of the effective in manner.” Ibid., ¶ 51). That, too, is conversion. And it is conversion all the more intense where the imitation is undertaken through a mirroring of values and norms through the looking glass of the virtual and its simulation of value. It is grounded in phenomenology (experience) but that can now be balanced between the physical and the virtual.
It is in this sense that one can heartily take up Broekman’s essential and fascinating point: the modernization of conversion as a router of change of position and functioning raises the fundamental issue of the possibility f a plural intersubjectivity. In Broekman’s imagery: “how can it be that climate developments and their often disastrous effects relate to patterns of human cognition and thus of specific patterns of cognition?” (Broekman, supra, p. 17). The connection is lingual: “Could that lingual activity de determined by a natural phenomenon on the one hand (climate) and human knowledge (language as a non-natural issue) on the other? (Ibid). One answer is that they are the two sides of the same human linguistic coin. This brings one back to the rhetorical insight of ming míng ((明名) intelligent naming, see above) but also to Nietzsche:
The importance of language in the development of civilization consists in the fact that by means of it man placed one world, his own, alongside another, a place of leverage that he thought so firm as to admit of his turning the rest of the cosmos on a pivot that he might master it. In so far as man for ages looked upon mere ideas and names of things as upon aeternae veritates, he evinced the very pride with which he raised himself above the brute. He really supposed that in language he possessed a knowledge of the cosmos. (Nietzsche, “Human All Too Human, “supra, ¶11).
Nonetheless, Broekman layers the lingual component of conversion with a historical one (Broekman, supra, pp. 17-19). Broekman implies, and it is worth underscoring, that history as object, sign, and signifier, remains for the most part an analogue concept. It is also an ancient one. But digitalization creates new forms of life and new ways of living, retaining, and disappearing the past. The mirroring is still there--the past as a mirror projecting the present into a signification of the past (Origin Cultures and Post-Global Empire--习近平：把中国文明历史研究引向深入 推动增强历史自觉坚定文化自信 [Xi Jinping: Lead the study of the history of Chinese civilization in-depth, promote the enhancement of historical consciousness and strengthen cultural self-confidence]).
Unlike liberal democratic states where official histories are embedded within the privatized factionalism of political and social movements whose representatives people our elective state institutions, and fuel the engines of academic and administrative apparatus for the management of correct thinking, Marxist Leninist states view the crafting of official history as both a necessity, and as an inherently public political project that is of the utmost importance for the chronicling of the work of the vanguard elements of society responsible for moving the nation toward the goals the progress toward the attainment of which is the principal measure of their legitimacy. That official history, then, (1) marks the progress of the vanguard, (2) is meant to serve as the official catechism of the rationalization of history with the vanguard forces at the center, (3) is object affirmation of which is meant to serve as a social signalling of fidelity to the political economic model, (4) organizes the progress (because history here is a progress from the start of legitimacy of the lens that brings order to facts) to its current state, (5) points to the future from a very specific discursive perspective that suggests the scope of the possible, (6) identifies internal taboos and enemies, (7) provides a concrete basis for judging historical activity (and future planning) as falling within the appropriate historical path or deviating from it, and (8) provides a temporal structure for the articulation and evidence of the application, challenges and success of the vanguard's ideology, its working style, its great triumphs and the lessons from the past that will propel the vanguard to renewed success in the future. ("Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century" [中共中央关于党的百年奋斗重大成就和历史经验的决议（全文）] Text and Thoughts)
Nonetheless, erasure and recasting a narrative of the past now requires mirroring action in both the physical and digital (virtual) realms. In the Soviet Era it was possible to erase and remake the past merely by eliminating people, tearing down sculptures, burning books, and airbrushing pictures and other images, and the like. In the new digital era that is no longer sufficient--an equally thorough airbrushing of virtual worlds is also required and a rewriting of virtual text necessary to reshape the past in the image preferred by the present to attempt to project onto the future. Again, it is that double mirroring that is critical--between consciousness and sentience in the physical and in the virtual worlds, and between them. This is plural subjectivity, and multi-dimensional semiotics. This was recently apparent in contemporary efforts to scrub a sacked foreign minister in China (China's Qin Gang Scrubbed From Foreign Ministry Site After Dramatic Removal(July 2023)); it is also apparent in the efforts to protect or change digital libraries and repositories for original source materials (Jonathan Zittrain, "The Internet Is Rotting: Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone" The Atlantic 30 June 2021).
In one profound sense Broekman, though, has struck brilliantly here—humans die, and others replace them, each situated in a sometimes substantially different point in the networked intersubjectivity, the semiotics of which can produce changes of position (conversion) but wholly within the confines of the human. History, for Broekman, “focused rather on the diverse flows of times which became recapitulated in frames of human cognition belonging to various positions.” (Broekman, supra, p. 18). And the router of changing positions: conversion! “Each relation between cognition, including each relation between knowledge and conversion will soon be understood as a form of conversion. The Leninism of semiotics in conversion absorbs its semiotic Marxism as the substance as cognition/knowledge. Indeed, it is no longer cognition that is of interest as a core concept, but the movement of cognition through conversion—through changes in function and position—inevitable, if slow given the scope of a human lifespan; increasingly faster when measured against the hyper-processing of the virtual. Cognition becomes the instantaneous picture of the flows of conversion.
This questionable position of the human subject and its subjectivity is a hitherto unknown and never ventured practice which came to life through the introduction and worldwide practices of digitality. These newly conceived practices and their special techniques brought a conversion that led to hitherto unknown forms of subjectivity.
Full stop.
These self-referencing systems are, in a sense both all too human and at the same time collectively supra-human in their good, bad, or indifferent habits of engaging with the stimuli that animate their programming. The problem, then, can be understood in semiotic terms. Where the language of social relations shifts from text to code, a transposition of the mechanics of orthodoxy is required. That mechanics requires both translation and quality control measures. That is it requires a re-invention of the signification of the signs and objects through which meaning is described and applied in social relations. It also requires a new supervisory structures--from the discretionary decision making of human collectives (public and private operating as an exogenous force against heresy), to the automated self learning machines that serve that purpose in the ecologies of enormous data flows (public and private analytics ted to judgments of aggregated data representing a quantified vision of social relations in macro and micro relations and endogenous (within) them).(Coding Orthodoxy; Automated Law; and Quality Control in AI--CAIDP (Center for AI and Digital Policy): OPEN AI (FTC 2023)).
Digitalization, big data analytics, the possibilities of simulation and the virtual world managed by self-generating artificial intelligence has remade—not the world—but human cognition of its relation to the world. The subject has externalized its own ego-self and re-created it in its own image. It now has a playmate. Digitalization has made possible a semiotic impossibility—the consciousness of ourselves and our virtual selves in mirrored and networked intersubjectivity in which subject, object, signified and signified all change position and function depending on position and perspective. At last one comes to understand cognition in the age of the digital—snapshots of flows of data in structurally coupled connection (conversion) in which the distinction between ego-self-selfie-Self-E collapses in both analogue and digital mirroring versions, and between them. Indeed, what becomes central to the semiotics of the Self(-E) is the flow. Cognition in the digital is “being in the flow;” a concept next considered by Broekman.
[1] Charles Fourneier, Théorie des quatres mouvements et des destinées generals (Lyon, 1808)
[2] Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Wek; in Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 1-2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhkamp Verlag, 1982).
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