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.
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),
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 4 examines Chapter 3 of the book, entitled "Post-Dialectics", and my own engagement with it.
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The generative problem for a philosophy of the conscious--and the sentient--remains. It revolves around communicative self-awareness but in both the physical and virtual worlds and between the self and the virtual self made in its own image , one that must be called by the name of the other. In the era of the digital, that poses a challenge, both as a matter of construction, and as a matter of its interface with the carefully structured governance structures of carbon based social relations. If the selfie/Self-E must be called by its name, how is that meant to be conveyed, and what, exactly is conveyed in that naming? To get there one must confront identity, and the objectivity of the self-E. But one must also confront the challenges of its communication through the now well worn self-reflexiveness of dialectics (in its broadest sense and with its broadest application to social relations). That, in turn requires a reorientation of communication from the static (particles, data) to dynamic (steps, data sets), and from an analogue (particles/steps) to a digital (data sets and iterative projections) orientation. But dialectics is a hard nut to crack; and its transposition to the digital becomes harder still. Of the two problems, Broekman confronts the first--putting the self and cognition in motion through a developed evocation of a post-dialectics, a dialectics in motion that will likely play a central (though sub textual) role in the regulation of generative AI. The second remains a central problem--coding an ontology (first principles) on the nature of being coded which is itself the sum of the iterative subjectivity of its being.
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Additional posts will consider each of the other nine chapters that make up this work. Links to the discussion of the book:
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.
5. Chapter 3 (Post-Dialectics)
The digitalization of knowledge, experience, consciousness, and sentience poses a great problem for the philosophy of knowledge. That problem is made greater by the expanded universe within which one encounters flow—among and between the self, selfie, Self-E (Broekman, supra, p. 43 (“Several notions, terms, and descriptions in the preceding chapters seem old fashioned, and many were foundational in the fields of conceptual tensions.”). And at its base is the problem of communication –both between the analogue and the digital; but perhaps more importantly within the digital itself. Having worked diligently for millennia to get to the root of knowledge aligned with the communication of it—that is to align consciousness with sentience even within the universe that starts and ends within the physical self—philosophy is now confronted with the digitalization of all that effort. But this presents, as alluded above a double problem. Communication must bridge the analogue-digital divide. But it must first, perhaps, develop its own language within the digital.
The first problem concerns conversion in its most direct form—a concept that Broekman introduces with Chapter 1 (and which I suggest in the language of silicon based consciousness serves as a coded router).Here Broekman’s marvelously fascinating alignment of mirroring, of temporality (not as flow but as pictures of flow in increasingly shorter time segments), and self-reflexive experience at the micro (individual) and collective (macro) levels, offers an important foundation for re-thinking language-communication as and within knowledge and its theory. But the second problem poses more interesting challenges. This second problem centers on the digitalization of communication. And it too, comes in two flavors. The first focuses on a digitalized linguistics of translation—this is digital linguistics in the traditional structures compatible with a purely human to human interconnection. The second touches on a purely digital linguistics—the language of the virtual self, the selfie and the Self-E. This second problem also touches on conversion but one that might be better understood as shaped by post-dialectical structures. By that one alludes to the transposition of communication into a system of iterative projections of content (traditionally perhaps thesis-antithesis-synthesis at its crudest but best known form; contradictions or irritants), from which meaning may be extracted (in its more ideologically robust guise—seeking truth through dialectics). But one no longer speaks to contradiction (Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937)); nor on a process of progression through synthesis thinking in the production and perfection of knowledge. Instead, like the flow (Chapter 2), digitalized post-dialectics focuses on the iterations, each of which contain the old dialectical progression, but for which that dialectical progression is reduced to one point in a longer arc of meaning. Again one returns to the calculus of knowledge, on the focus on the movement between dialectical resolution (or even confrontation).
And thus one arrives at the heart of the fascinating discussion in Chapter 3, of post dialectics, and of language in search of communication—and communicants. Here one uses communicant quite specifically. The term denotes a person who imparts or consumes information; but in a richer vein and more semiotically relevant, the term connotes a person who receives Holy Communion in the Catholic tradition. Communion in this sense is a deeply semiotic term evoking object (the ritual and acts), sign/signification (its representational significs); and interpretation (its performance of solidarity at every level of communal relations) (for its rich semiotics as communication see Catechism, Part 2 (the Celebration of Christian Mystery), Article 3 (The Sacrament of the Eucharist), pp. 334-348 [https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/350/]). The body of believers and their unity now acquires both a plural form and a dynamic focus. The rituals of unity in the body of the believers now takes on new form in its insemination of and with and by the virtual spaces to which it is tied.
What for me is rooted in the notions of iterations within flow is for Broekman rooted in the fascination with the particle. That is also profound. He notes the alignment of philosophy and physics with the “very special dynamics of particle localization” (Broekman, supra, 43). Particle localization, though, suggests to him the term ‘dialectics.’ That connection then leads to another—the connection between particle localization and spatially centered dialectics (my iterative dialectics) and the flow. “The term ‘particle’ seems therefore to be chosen by the Occidental mind as a basic component for all expressivities which unveil the dynamics of thoughts and their flowing formation” (Broekman, supra, p. 44; with a nod to Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project (H Eiland, K McLaughlin (trans); Harvard University Press)).
First considered in this framework—as a movement toward post dialectics in the digital—are conversion within and from dialectics (Broekman, supra, pp. 44-49). Broekman acknowledges both the power of dialectics and its anachronistic character in the age of the digital”—and certainly with respect to seeking truth.
Today the term is used to ironically circumscribe a sophistical reasoning or to forward a pejorative expression. Dialectics is indeed a term which (in its most general sense) indicates the inner dynamics of moving ideas, notions, expressions, words, and abstractions, implying their constant link to wholeness and movement.” (Broekman, supra, p. 44).
This moves one step closer to a post-dialectics iterative dialectics grounded in the “in-betweeness” of the flow. “In the flow are vested positions of knowledge impossible—a standpoint is dissolved because any standing will be freed from the static and thus safeguard its dynamics in the flow.” (Broekman, supra., p. 44). And thus back to the objectivity of the particle and its analogue dialectic: “Positions [the moment of stillness where everything solidifies for an instant] are external to flows but steps feature flows: that is one of the most clearly visible changes in the traditional knowledge-acquiring schemas.” (Broekman, supra., p. 44).
Here Broekman reminds us that the way in which one looks at a picture determines its description, as well as the orienting axis for seeking truth. All descriptions of pictures are static—and analogue. But the flow reminds us of the dynamism underlying the static picture Broekman uses the example of the tree: one has a preference for the whole (the tree) but not the wood (its skin). Yet observing the wood is also like observing the tree for it fails to reveal the sap beneath, the animals on the tree, or more generally the ecology in which the tree may be found. (Ibid., 45). More generally, reflecting on a thing (object; particle) is encoded in interrogatories producing systems of questions and answers that are encased, in turn, in the rhythms of the dialectic and its lust for the resolution of contradiction, producing the opportunity for another iteration of the process. There are many trees. And this produces the essence of an analogue dialectical flow, whose eddies send us up the tributaries to Marx (dialectics of materialism and its emphasis on antithesis) or Hegel (dialectics of the mind and its emphasis on the thesis), and the like. Broekman’s exquisite description of this “nineteenth century thinking”(Broekman, supra, p. 45-46) reminds one of the very small leap from dialectics to reasoning and from reasoning to reason (Ibid., p. 47). It was an even smaller leap from dialectics to goal oriented realities—from liberal democratic progressivism to Leninist progress toward communism—”to a final solution to the riddles of human life.” (Ibid.). These are leaps of the mind that is solidified as “knowledge” and imposed through the managed iterations of “experience” a dialectics, as Nietzsche, might suggest, of collectives addicted to the realities of the priest (Cf., Tobias Kuehne, Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Dialectics,” Journal of European Studies 48(2) (2018) 115-132).
And yet it is here that Broekman makes a fascinating connection between conversion and dialectics (Broekman, supra, p,. 48). Broekman notes that “conversion is always understood in connection with the opposites of fixation and standstill.” (Ibid.). Thus dialectics as embedded in the routing function of conversion. But also a return to the tree analogy and the dialectical structures of wholeness from out of the dynamic aggregation of its parts.
Knowledge is in this perspective a means of entering wholeness through determining a ‘something’ as its very temporary ‘object.’ Only sensual security concerning that object justifies for him the question, which is central in knowledge processes: ‘what is this?’ And with the question comes the answer—both are impossible without language! (Broekman supra, p. 49).
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Dialectics, Broekman tells us, then, is more than it was—it is the picture of flow. But is it digital?
On approach to this question is through consideration of the negative dialectics (Broekman, supra., pp. 49-56; with a big nod to Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics (EB Ashton (trans); London: Routledge, 1973)). Simply put—a negative dialectics shifts the focus of the gaze (and thus the perception of reality) from the tree (Broekman’s example, p. 45) to the sap and the bords nestling in its branches. That is, negative dialectics rejects the relevance of wholeness, of the still picture, of perfect knowledge. In its place it offers the perfection of the moment and the perfectibility of knowledge of the movements from one perfect moment to the next.
This is, in turn, a function of two ideas distilled from the post-modernity of negative dialectics (Broekman, p. 50). The first is that of the relationship to human empirical knowledge to that cluster of concepts that have been named “knowledge” and “experience.” “Knowledge” and “experience” are semiotically constructed (as clusters of meanings driven by principles which are driven by the dialectics of meaning) as epistemology and phenomenology. Yet in this guise they provide comfort (in the way that was understood by Nietzsche--The Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize With the Hammer (Anthony Ludovici (trans.; London: TN Foulis, 1911 (Project Gutenberg eBook#52263))--by solidifying the smoke of mirrors of consciousness as sentience. . . .consciously and then naturalized through managed (tutored) experience. The second relates to the notion that a relation between subject and object is always necessary to produce knowledge. We arrive at the same place. The issue is not one of the pieces, but what the human desires to acknowledge. The volitional element of knowledge is emphasized here in this way of viewing things. This is the nature of the relation of the human to their experience on a moving train where the essence of the experience changes whether the viewer looks forward, looks directly out the window, or looks in the direction of the path the train has already taken. Still life views, the compression of time and space, and the like will change depending on the view. But this is a simple notion that Einstein developed.
Nonetheless, this also raises the critical question: if the thrust of a 21st century philosophy shifts perspective from the static to the dynamic, from the grasping of a wholeness that is transcendent (in the fulfillment of the journey to knowledge) to the flow and from cognition to the structures of conversion from one state of the conscious to another (and thus a dynamic sentience, then might the inversion of dialectics provide the language required for its communication (and really its formation?). Broekman suggests the answer is . . . . maybe. I am skeptical except in the analogue world. For all the effort, post modernity remains on the train (my example above) in physical space and in time. One is still developing a human centered relation to Broekman’s example of the tree (Broekman. Supra. p. 45). The post-modernity of negative dialectics may still be reduced to a stance—an intriguing and useful on—to the extent that it at last acknowledges the plural nature of knowing. But the human is still at the center; and not just the “human.” Its inherent limitation, and narcissism, lies in the conceit of the individual human around which all of this “Philosophizing With(out) a Hammer (to turn Nietzsche’s book title (above) and its content on its ear). And this bundle of reality, grounded in the intersubjectivity within and between the individual and human collectives (the stuff of legal semiotics—Paul Van den Hoven, “Kevelson’s General Theory of Norms, Some Semiotic Remarks, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 1(3) (1988) 297; Jan M. Broekman and Frank Fleerackers, Legal Signs Fascinate: Kevelson’s Research on Semiotics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018) ), remains opaque to its selfie, Self-E. In place of dialectics (transcendent or negative) one must consider the power (as conversion in cognitive processes) of variable iteration, which, when orders to suit, produces its made-to-measure consciousness.
The power of variable iteration as a form of transformation of dialectics follows from the semiotic constitution of virtual consciousness and its sentience. That virtual world--inhabiting silicon based bodies and immersed in a phenomenology of code, fed on data which is itself both object and symbol of the building blocks of virtual sentience—remains in different to the arguments about transcendence and fracture. That world could care less about the solidity or the eternity of truth—or truths (personal or collective truths about which 2nd millennium society obsesses, perhaps as its own phenomenology of social psychosis (e.g., Jeremy Wyatt and Joseph Ulatowski, “With so many people speaking ‘their truth’, how do we know what the truth really is?,” The Conversation (30 May 2023) [https://theconversation.com/with-so-many-people-speaking-their-truth-how-do-we-know-what-the-truth-really-is-205388]). It might not care a wit, as well, about the post-modern infatuation with de-subjecting the subject (but of course never straying far from the subject); where the subject is itself understood as temporary aggregations of flow constituted within carbon or silicon casings. And if it cared, both fracture and transcendence might be understood as objects—variables—with which generative AI sentience can play with (in the sense of varying its parameters to tease out predictive consequences. Nor does it require a language of dialectics to communicate flow understood as a servant of this form of epistemology. This world has the interactivity of the variability of parameters that permits it to escape the constraints of time and place (Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society 1250-1600 (Cambridge University Press, 1997)). That is the point of the plural flow that Broekman has introduced. Dialectics may be a useful way of operationalizing the router function of conversion, or even its availability as a translator of sorts. But the selfie/Self-E remain indifferent.
Broekman considers these challenges through his analysis of the groundwork of our philosophical forebearers and the consequences of their ideas (implied but perhaps veiled even to them) (Broekman, supra., pp. 51-56). This is bound up in the Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Penguin Classics, 2009 (1678)) of identity. One might as well speak of the soul (Peter Tyler, “’The Return of the Soul’: Psychology, Theology and Soul Making,” New Blackfriers 97 (2016) 187-201). Broekman, instead (as one expects) draws on Adorno and Wittgenstein (Broekman, supra, pp 51-54). First is the idea that identity is itself “beyond the thinkable (ibid., p. 52), and then that it is not relational (ibid., p. 53). “If identity is not a relation, as Wittgenstein suggested, then is identity a moment of the flow of thought formation. The characteristic of the first is not a feature of the second—both belong to the flow, the dynamics, an evolution, a mode.” (Ibid.). The virtual self, perhaps, suggests something more profound—that the instantaneous picture of the self is both solid in that instant, and ephemeral in relation to time. But in the moment it is as real as one (individual or collective) wants to make it—and the picture can linger for as long as collective discipline permits. Here the plural intersubjectivity of the physical-virtual provides enhanced technologies. That perhaps is what the current crop of leaders (Nietzsche’s priest) fear most.
In the analogue—and perhaps as a bridge—Broekman offers dialectics as a language of a flow that can be seized by the physical (individual or collective) self.
A remarkable difference of expression fascinates when dialectics as a flow are considered in relation to human behavior. Participating actively in narration differs from participating in a flow, or a streaming named dialectics. The first is usually considered as a position (often also as a role) and we characterize the second as a step.
And back to the connection between particles (particularity—the snapshot, the balance sheet etc.) and flow (steps, motion, the spaces between, the activity memorialized in and as the ledger, iterative action etc.). Most importantly, steps in the flow are not pre-destined (an important and likely controversial point for believers in the inevitabilities of science or the divine force). “What is more: the order of steps is neither a natural phenomenon nor an occurrence beyond intelligence and responsibility of the performing subject.” (Broekman, supra., p. 54.)
Now the analogue is set in motion (Broekman’s first objective). That takes the form of focusing on the movement from thesis to antithesis and through to synthesis that immediately becomes the thesis of the new era. That motion is given a language (dialectics) that can be used to activate convergence as the foundation of cognition. Nonetheless it is given no direction other than that which motion itself produces—though humanity is well equipped to name this direction and to assume that direction itself is sentient and purposeful (as a form of reassurance within traditional forms of coherence of intersubjectivity). That brings Broekman back to the notion of intelligent naming--明名 (Míng míng) (Guiguzi: China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric (Hui Wu (trans); Carbondale: SIU Press, 2016), p. 59-60)). Here he draws on Western tradition—and the 明名 (Míng míng) at the foundation of biblical semiotics (Broekman, supra, p. 55-56). His focus is on Eve—the essence of yin (and perhaps thus of flow), rather than the penetrative power of yang, and the dialectics represented in the Fall. “The task of naming changed into the layered task of answering and questioning, that is: to a dynamic language, which was impossible in the language before the Fall.” (Broekman, supra, p. 56). Now is the time for a transposition to the virtual that us implied but unstated; the parallels are unmistakable from God to Humanity and from humanity to its generative silicon based “Adam.”
The birth of the two children Cain and Abel also changed their Selves: Eve told Adam a most inner experience of herself, when saying: ‘When He (God) created me and my husband, He created us by Himself, but in the birth of this child, we are partners with Him.’ . . . The Self has entered the ages as one of their major issues, clad by language.” (Broekman, supra, p. 56).
That leaves for Broekman the semiotic question of “firstness.” (Ibid., pp. 57-62). Intelligent naming--明名 (Míng míng) requires an object (physical or abstract). It represents “tensions around firstness.” (Broekman, supra, p. 57). And this brings us to the “post” in post dialectics—the language of the flow for a second millennium philosophy of the unthinkable. Just as Nietzsche moved Beyond Good and Evil (Walter Kaufmann (trans); NY: Random House, 1966), so Broekman moves beyond dialectics.
Post-dialectics is in this light not a term to indicate ‘leave dialectics´, or ‘condemn them as a bad progenitor’ but rather a term indicating the challenge to reach beyond themselves, indeed: beyond dialectics and see the flow, the unfolding, which dialectics truly indicates. Post-dialectical components guide us form positions and methods to insight and unfolding knowledge, thought, patterns, and consciousness.” (Broekman, supra, pp. 57-58).
One has at last arrived to the doorstep of iterative dialectics, to the flow in code and to the challenges of a language that bridges the intersubjectivity of the self in motion with that of the Self-E in data streams.
For Broekman, that road leads through ‘firstness.’ That journey invokes context, and taking time as a constitutive element of that context (ibid., pp. 58-59). And it may require the performativity of the post-modern—to step out of the natural realm in order to become conscious of its metaphysics—its first principles (ibid., pp. 60-61). Or, in the language of the virtual: to become conscious of the power of the self over the construct of its own first principles. Broekman, however, remains fascinated by the possibilities of a plural ontology derived from his reading of Husserl (ibid). Its analogue character is both decisive and powerful (ibid., pp. 61-62). But it is in the leap from phenomenology to data sets—that is form experience to the recording of experience (a double firstness?), that one can approach the digital. The Self-E remains cut off from post-dialectics; it needs to be brought in.
The generative problem for a philosophy of the conscious--and the sentient--remains. It revolves around communicative self-awareness but in both the physical and virtual worlds and between the self and the virtual self made in its own image , one that must be called by the name of the other. In the era of the digital, that poses a challenge, both as a matter of construction, and as a matter of its interface with the carefully structured governance structures of carbon based social relations. If the selfie/Self-E must be called by its name, how is that meant to be conveyed, and what, exactly is conveyed in that naming? To get there one must confront identity, and the objectivity of the self-E. But one must also confront the challenges of its communication through the now well worn self-reflexiveness of dialectics (in its broadest sense and with its broadest application to social relations). That, in turn requires a reorientation of communication from the static (particles, data) to dynamic (steps, data sets), and from an analogue (particles/steps) to a digital (data sets and iterative projections) orientation. But dialectics is a hard nut to rack; and its transposition to the digital becomes harder still. Of the two problems, Broekman confronts the first--putting the self and cognition in motion through a developed evocation of a post-dialectics, a dialectics in motion that will likely play a central (though sub textual) role in the regulation of generative AI. The second remains a central problem--coding an ontology (first principles) on the nature of being coded which is itself the sum of the iterative subjectivity of its being.
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