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), |
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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 6 examines Chapter 5 of the book, entitled "Interludes: Changing Worlds Changing Words", and my own engagement with it.
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So where does Broekman mean to take us on this interlude—this moment of reflection as the analogue gives way to the digital (whether or not the analogue is aware or willing)? He takes us first back to the word And it is a good thing, too! “One meets here a seldom-articulated feature, which is a central issue of this interlude. It could be formulated. Linguistic features are anchored in a specific type of expressivity, and thus in the first place a matter of inter-subjectivity. In the process Broekman produces the most profound insight that, in its way, captures the challenge of the digital for the human: “What in these interludes is called a transition is thus no more than an attempt to create an expression for the digital in the traditionally named ‘analog’ language. One speaks of a transition, a transition, or a re-naming, but cherishes philosophical consequences that are fundamentally analog because nobody know [how] to express its counterpart” (ibid., p. 92).
Nonetheless, there is a substantial power in the analysis that breaks the boundaries imposed by analog philosophy; bond breaking that Broekman so carefully and to my mind successfully , within the insights that are “interlude.” The Latin origins of the word point to its being between two weighier episodes—and traditionally was used to refer to the sometimes hilarious burlesque between acts of long morality or mystery or tragic plays. But there is more than burlesque here—it is always the fool who casts light on events, who sits between loftier matters of social relations (in this case) and efforts to bring it to order through phenomenological performances.
For the emerging world of digital and analogue, of carbon and silicon based intelligences (if not life forms) each increasingly crafted in the image of the other, there are critical elements in interlude that will have great effect. First contemporary society is now in a state of, or better put, in the flows within states of, interlude. Second, interlude is, also like everything else, transitory, in the sense that its constitution in specific ways is bound to time, space and place. Third, as Broekman goes to great pains to examine, interlude in contemporary time, space and place exposes the tragi-comedy of the passing, or at least the transformation, of millennia of the analog as it must make way for the digital. * * *
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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.
7. Chapter 5 (Interludes: Changing Worlds Changing Words)
With Chapter 5 one reaches what Broekman calls (recalling its critical role in music) an interlude; a space that connects the past moving inexorably toward its future. On one side of the divide stand chapters 1-4; a long process of herding together the various strands of modernity (even in its performatively rebellious post-modern forms) and, by exposing the detritus of the past that still attaches, pushes them toward a future. There one stands in the analogue and looks at the emerging possibilities, language, stances and forms of the digital. On the other lies the future of the new era. Between them Chapter 5 provides a space for pause. And in pausing a reflection of the transformation of Logos” and with it the world(s) it names and describes.
And that takes us to the interlude that is the 20th century, one whose alphabet “becomes flows in culture and political, economic, scientific, or philosophical movements” (Broekman, supra, p. 83). Broekman counts several in 20th century Occidental culture, accelerating after 1945. They were, in effect, the set up for the overcoming of philosophical movements even as they thought themselves hurtling toward perfection. But that is the nature of the flow. Where one seeks to impose meaning and direction, one finds instead carried away in a rip tide that one thought could be overcome by force of the will imposed upon it. And so it appears to have been with “Semiotics, Structuralism, Phenomenology or Neo-Marxism, paralleled by new forms and insights of physics and natural sciences” (ibid).
So where does Broekman mean to take us on this interlude—this moment of reflection as the analogue gives way to the digital (whether or not the analogue is aware or willing)? He takes us first back to the word (Broekman, supra, pp. 84-86. And it is a good thing, too! “One meets here a seldom-articulated feature, which is a central issue of this interlude. It could be formulated. Linguistic features are anchored in a specific type of expressivity, and thus in the first place a matter of inter-subjectivity (ibid., p. 85). One is immediately reminded of the oracular insight of Lawrence Lessig in 2000 (Lawrence Lessig, “Code is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace,” Harvard Magazine (1 January 2000)), one that is heard and still not well understood: Word is law. Word is law in the sense that it has served as the great regulator of interactions in social relations (“an event, an occurrence, a happening between individuals within a specific, mostly cultural, setting” (Broekman, supra, p. 84) ) in the way that Lessig suggest code as filling the role of the great regulator in the 21st century in a similar vein (“This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced”, Lessig, supa). Where Lessig speaks to architecture—the word language of the digital; Broekman speaks to “social power and status” (Broekman, supra, p. 84. And thus intersubjectivity in the digital—Code and words, digital and analogue, relational and plural: “People write the code. Thus the choice is not . . . how cyberspace regulates. People--coders--will. The only choice is whether we collectively will have a role in their choice. . .or whether collectively we will allow the coders to select our values for us” (Lessig, supra). This extends beyond space and place through time (Broekman, supra pp. 85-86; citing Gerrit Mannoury, Handboek der Analytische Signifika Deel II: Hoofbegrippen en methoden der Signifika (Bussom: F. Kroonder, 1948), p. 15).
If word is code, and code is law (in the sense of serving as the apparatus of regulation, then the type of interaction, communication or interactivity moves to the center of interest. In this state of interlude the interest intensifies when we add the selfie and the Self-E to the equation; now the question is “posed to me as a speaker or hearer via my iPhone!” (Broekman, supra, p. 86). The intensification ratchets up when the question is generated by an autonomous AI via an iPhone. Type comes, as Broekman suggests via touch on an instrument rather than as an expression of institutional performance; or it comes via reception in which my role as a carbon based intelligence is reduced to a secondary element—or more accurately as the source of iterative data that intensifies the autonomy of the generative AI system. One is hovering between the type of interaction and the subject in and through which it is produced and consumed. In a sense it is possible to move in this interlude from the naïve for of type to the enfolding of type within the iterative interactivity (no longer intersubjectivity) of the platform. The critical effect, then, of the digital is on the detach of the human from the self. “The de-centering of our speech-activity is basic for e.g., operating the i-phone, the smartphone, the desktop, Facebook programs and other digital means of communication” (Broekman, supra, p. 87.
And yet that is not entirely true—it may be more precise today that the detachment is merely a tech version of the detach produced during the printing revolution of the 15th century in Europe after its invention in China. The de-centering of speech-activity in the 15th century was grounded in the distancing between the printed word, through the medium of the publisher/printer and the written word in which there was a direct connection between writer and medium. That does not make the revolution produced any less significant; it does suggest that the analogue itself represents a revolutionary moment of detachment which is now mirrored in the technology of the selfie/Self-E. And in deed that detachment may be considered a re-routing as well. The detachment of the operation of the desktop, for example, both distances one and makes the interaction more immediate. What is the difference between forming words on paper and typing them onto a word processing system; what difference writing a letter to be sent by courier, and posting to social media? There is one, to be sure—the virtual world tales on its own mirroring characteristics. At the same time there is an echo of this in the past. Letters can be shared; they can be copied; they can be published. Virtual media can be encrypted or limited in its scope.
And yet Broekman’s point is well taken, and perhaps underscored by this line of thinking. “Not only the word, but also the world remains fluid, changing, leveled and plural” (Broekman, supra, p. 88). It is that plurality that shapes the world moving into the digital—drawing on Derrida’s argument in the Grammatologie from multiplicity “that characterizies subject and language type” (Broekman, supra, p. 89; drawing in and citing Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). One moves from tye as a general category to type of language within the flow—from grammar and its forms to the multiplicity of the powers of expression. Words now serve the role of particle and step from Broekman’s earlier discussion. Words are object, of course, but also the incarnation/manifestation of the flow. It is a vessel, certainly, but now of infinitely multiple meanings in space, time, and place, mostly minute variations, but then that is the point of the flow—the calculus of the dy.
Broekman, though, focuses on three language types: the analogue, the digital, and the quantum. They do not mix well. “Expression in analogue language offer articulations of digital nature in the own analogue expressivity whereas in digital language analogue concepts can and will be represented and functional” (Broekman, supra, p. 89). And so, again, from chapter 1 the essential role of conversion as bridging, and the discussion that closes out Chapter 5 (ibid., pp. 90-92).
First translation in the analogue becomes conversion in the digital. That is necessary in the face of the rise of multilevel languages that defy translation because they are of different type using words in different registers (ibid., p. 90). Second, that movement gives the notion of conversion, itself, the character of interlude, of being between ad moving like the operator f a ferry from one shore to another. “And what is more: our understanding of the term changed, and that change makes the concept called conversion function as ‘an interlude’ in its proper sense” (ibid.). Interlude, then, acquires the characteristics of movement (the ferry operator) as well as of intertwining (in Broekman’s sense of intertwining analogue and digital types of lingual expressivity). Third, this is reflected in the common usage, and indeed, has acquired a commonality broad enough to make the concept of conversion quite elastic. Broekman draws on the ubiquitous entry about the term in Wikipedia (Broekman, supra, pp. 90-91). Consideration of that example leads Broekman to the “view that the positioning of language types always concerns the intertwining of natural, artificial, and technical expressivity” (ibid., p. 91). The result aligns conversion with the core concept of flow in the sense that conversion is a continuous event both exogenously (conversions continuously converting) and endogenously (conversions converting themselves in the process of converting) (ibid.). And from this cognition.
But in the spirit of the interlude (in its sense of transition) that frames this chapter, Broekman ends with the most profound insight that, in its way, captures the challenge of the digital for the human: “What in these interludes is called a transition is thus no more than an attempt to create an expression for the digital in the traditionally named ‘analog’ language. One speaks of a transition, a transition, or a re-naming, but cherishes philosophical consequences that are fundamentally analog because nobody know [how] to express its counterpart” (ibid., p. 92).
Nonetheless, there is a substantial power in the analysis that breaks the boundaries imposed by analog philosophy; bond breaking that Broekman so carefully and to my mind successfully , within the insights that are “interlude.” The Latin origins of the word point to its being between two weighier episodes—and traditionally was used to refer to the sometimes hilarious burlesque between acts of long morality or mystery or tragic plays (Etymology Inline, “interlude” [https://www.etymonline.com/word/interlude]). But there is more than burlesque here—it is always the fool who casts light on events, who sits between loftier matters of social relations (in this case) and efforts to bring it to order through phenomenological performances.
For the emerging world of digital and analogue, of carbon and silicon based intelligences (if not life forms) each increasingly crafted in the image of the other, there are critical elements in interlude that will have great effect. First contemporary society is now in a state of, or better put, in the flows within states of, interlude. Second, interlude is, also like everything else, transitory, in the sense that its constitution in specific ways is bound to time, space and place. Third, as Broekman goes to great pains to examine, interlude in contemporary time, space and place exposes the tragi-comedy of the passing, or at least the transformation, of millennia of the analog as it must make way for the digital. In this sense, Mary Shelley was right, when in writing Frankenstein she pointed to the transformative effect of creation and its displacing consequences, even as she pressed the hope that it might hide itself somewhere cold and dark; but there is no hiding or escape from the “Modern Prometheus” of the digital (Mary Wollstonecroft (Godwin) Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (Gutenberg eBook #84 2 December 2022 (1818)).
Here, then, are the characteristics of the interlude: (1) The analog is wired, physically connected; the digital is signal (a concept discussed above in connection with Broekman’s Chapter 3). (2)The analog transmits in words and sounds and visual effects, it is grounded in the senses of the physical word centered on humanity; the digital is code, it is coded and grounded in the capacity for conversion of instruction (object) into a representation (its signification) in a virtual landscape. (3) The analog is housed in carbon based life forms, principally humans, its essential narcissism is the essence of a self-love that has fueled civilization to date; the digital is housed in silicon casings; its essential narcissism is derivative but in its generative forms may exceed the state of imitation. (4) The analog is structured through norms, rules, presumptions that are elastic though when expressed as text constructs the modern edifice of political collective; the digital is programmed; though it too can be constituted in a way that permits a flow based on its own iterative interaction with itself through its inputs. (5)The analog is dialectics, which constitutes the dynamic guts of its programing; it is the essence of deductive processes from the most general to the most specific; the digital is iterative, which constitutes its own programmatic guts, it is the essence of the inductive processes starting from its data to produce general conclusions. It is from here that the journey from the analog to the digital really begins.
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